Psychological Warfare

Posted on March 4, 2022 by camelotkidd

The conformity is startling. Russia is the new enemy, Putin is Satan and everyone agrees.

Watching it I can only marvel at the efficiency of the American propaganda machine, finely tuned after a century of application. I have been studying propaganda since my time in the military when I realized that our government lies religiously and I’ve never seen anything like what is happening with the coverage of the Ukraine.

I’m blown away by the complete unity and consensus in U.S. political and media circles. It is as close to a unanimous and dissent-free discourse as anything in memory, certainly since the days following 9/11. After 9/11 we were bombarded with messaging about a sinister foreign leader, creating an environment of shrill hysteria that was very hard to stand up against. This was used to whip up support for pre-existing objectives of US geo-strategic dominance.

Sound familiar?

Russia-gate is the new variant separating the aftermath of 9/11 from the current moment. Starting in mid-2016, the Democratic political and media class fixated on convincing Americans to view Russia as a grave threat to them and their lives by implying that Trump was a secret Russian agent. They created a climate in Washington in which any attempts to forge better relations with the Kremlin or even to open dialogue with Russian diplomats and even just ordinary Russian nationals was depicted as inherently suspect if not criminal. All of that primed American political culture to react with contempt and rage toward Russia, and once they invaded Ukraine, virtually no effort was needed to direct that long-brewing hostility into an uncontrolled quest for vengeance and destruction.

What’s still amazing is the climate that arises whenever a new war erupts, instantly creating propaganda-driven, dissent-free consensus. It seems that there is no propaganda as potent or powerful as war propaganda. It seems that one must have lived through it at least once, as an engaged adult, to understand how it functions, how it manipulates and distorts, and how one can resist being consumed by it.

In war, truth is the first casualty, and is replaced by lies that go something like this: We do not want war. The opposite party alone is guilty of war. The enemy is inherently evil and resembles the devil. We defend a noble cause, not our own interests. The enemy commits atrocities on purpose; ours are “collateral damage”. The enemy uses forbidden weapons. We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous. Recognized artists and intellectuals back our cause. Our cause is sacred. All who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

During war, propaganda is invariably accompanied by censorship.

“I’m concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the spread of Russian propaganda,” US Senator Mark Warner tweeted on Friday.

I guess it’s only propaganda when it’s Russian propaganda, the US would never propagandize its population, now would they?

For years US lawmakers have been using threats of onerous regulation to pressure Silicon Valley companies into limiting online speech in a way that aligns with the interests of the US empire, effectively creating a system of government censorship by proxy. It would appear that we’re seeing a new expansion of this phenomenon today. This latest blitz is all about the the agenda to continually expand and normalize the censorship of unauthorized speech. That’s what it was about when they were pretending it was about fighting Covid misinformation before that, and when they were pretending it was about the need to fight domestic US extremism before that, and when they were pretending it was about the need to defend election security before that, and when they were pretending it was about the need to fight Russian propaganda the first time before cycling around to a new Cold War.

Given the scant attention most Americans pay to world affairs, they usually lack the proper context or history to understand the character of any conflict that makes the news cycle. For many Americans the US instigated coup in 2014 is distant history, and they know nothing of the anti-Russian provocations and attacks on the Donbass, or that the CIA has been overseeing a covert training program for Ukrainian intelligence operatives and special ops forces since 2015. Hence the Russian invasion of Ukraine gets reduced to a Manichean struggle between pure good and unspeakable evil.

Anyone who deviates from the propaganda barrage must be attacked or smeared: either get on board or stay silent lest you be similarly vilified. And that, in turn, means there are fewer and fewer people willing to publicly question prevailing narratives, which makes it in turn far more difficult for anyone else to separate themselves from unified group-think.

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R2P

Posted on February 26, 2022 by camelotkidd

Karma sure is a bitch.

R2P. Responsibility to protect. It’s the fatuous excuse that US foreign policy elite have used for decades to justify their destruction of other countries. It has been a stock part of international discourse on interventions in the post–Cold War period, tied to the doctrine of protecting ethnic groups within a foreign country.

But now that Russia is invoking the concept to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk and deploying a peacekeeping mission to those areas, the US is bleating about “sovereignty”.

Predictably, Western corporate media has already gone totally berserk branding it as the much-awaited Russian “invasion” to destroy “democracy”.

Here’s Biden. “Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called countries on territory that belonged to his neighbors? This is a flagrant violation of international law and it demands a firm response from the international community.”

I would be remiss if I neglected my senator–Mittens: “Putin’s Ukrainian invasion is the first time in 80 years that a great power has moved to conquer a sovereign nation.”

The hypocrisy is laughable. The US is the very last government on this entire planet who has any business talking about respecting the sovereignty of other nations. Has everyone forgotten about the invasion of Iraq? What about the present US occupation of Syria? After all, the Americans are still illegally occupying a section of Syrian territory and stealing their oil.

That’s some respect for sovereignty there.

Then there’s the historical precedent much closer to Russia. By formally recognizing the independent Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, Putin and his national security team are following the lead of how the US handled the break up of Yugoslavia into three separate republics. Essentially, Russia is borrowing from the West’s “humanitarian intervention” playbook and calling these “peacekeeping” forces.  NATO describes how its role as a “peace keeper” preceded the establishment of Kosovo. Moreover, in diplomatic discourse, this recognition can be likened to the precedent that the United States and its NATO allies set when they recognized the independence of Kosovo from Yugoslavia. The justification then was alleged genocidal intentions of the Serbs, the very same issue that Putin has raised with regard to Kiev’s intentions in Donbas.

The Russian president officially signed the decree recognizing the independence of two breakaway regions earlier on Monday. He has instructed the Russian Defense Ministry to send peacekeepers into the Donbass, while telling the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to establish diplomatic relations with both Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. For Russia, this is their “humanitarian intervention.” Putin probably appreciates the irony. Here’s the clincher, directly addressing imperial support for the killing of ethnic Russians in Donbass: “The main task of our decision [on recognizing independence] was to preserve and protect these lives. This is more important than all your threats.”

This is what R2P looks like from a Russian perspective. If NATO refuses to pressure Ukraine to implement Minsk, and refuses to offer any assurances on NATO membership and is going to sanction Russia anyway, then why not just recognize the breakaways independence and have them invite in Russian “peacekeepers”?

I really wish our political and media pundits would provide a little bit of history and context in their pronouncements. You can’t smash up up countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria Libya, Panama, etc. then whine about sovereignty and act all butt-hurt when other countries take actions to protect their security.

Who am I kidding? The Blob and US corporate media can lie with impunity, describe the US, NATO and Ukraine as pure as driven snow, while depicting Putin and Russia as the personification of evil, and Americans will nod in agreement.

The rest of the world, however, understands very well that now the rules have changed.

Update: It’s on. Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the goal of which Putin claims is not to occupy the country but to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” it.

The Russian invasion the corporate media has been shrieking about for months has finally happened. Of course a stopped clock is right twice a day too.

And, while right on the invasion, the corporate media is wrong or lying on the reasons why. For instance, they are trying to censor any talk about the known actions by NATO powers and Ukraine which experts have long warned would lead to this situation. You’re not allowed to talk about the known US/NATO/Ukraine actions which demonstrably led us to where we’re at. You’re only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked, in a vacuum, solely because he is evil and hates freedom.

The propaganda in our country is brutally effective. Americans, especially liberals, have spent the last few years being persuaded to hate Russia through hatred of Trump and Russia-gate. Conservatives are just as persuadable. The usual approach is to sucker people into believing they are defending freedom, protecting democracy or destroying tyranny.

I witnessed it yesterday in a conversation with a normally rational and skeptical friend, who became heated and claimed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was like so totally different than the US invasion of Iraq. It just was and there was nothing I could say.

So why did Russia finally invade?

I believe that Ukrainian President Zelensky’s comments at the Munich Security Conference in favor of acquiring nuclear weapons was one of the decisive factors, but the fact that Ukraine is already a de-facto member of NATO, while being pumped full of advanced weapons and military trainers, surely played a part in Putin’s decision.

Stay tuned.

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Mis, Dis and Mal-information

Posted on February 18, 2022 by camelotkidd

A recent Homeland Security alert made me laugh. “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.”

Talk about projection.

Of course, the corporate media is filled with mis, dis and mal-information, but they do so in a manner to advance state propaganda so it’s all good.

We’ve reached a late stage period where the managers of the US empire have only a tenuous grasp over reality, and have failed to notice that the dogs are refusing to eat the dog-food. In other words, the all encompassing propaganda is having a declining efficiency. For example, Forbes recently reported that “Fewer Americans than ever before trust the mainstream media.”

That’s brought about the frantic efforts at censorship. It’s not about Joe Rogan. It’s not about Covid misinformation. It’s not about QAnon, Russian trolls, domestic extremists or election security. It’s about ruling power structures needing to normalize and expand the regulation of online speech in order to manufacture consent for the status quo.

Which happens to be war. All the fucking time, in case you have somehow managed to miss the non-stop Russian invasion story.

Anyone who disputes any part of this official story is peddling misinformation, or is a Russian bot, or is an anti-semite, or is a dangerous extremist, or is mentally ill, or is whatever they need to be in order to ensure that they are never taken seriously by anyone and are silenced on social media and are never given a mainstream audience. 

Like yours truly.

It’s clear that the corporate media simply acts as gatekeepers for the establishment economic and political actors and disseminates an approved narrative. Despite all the outrage over fake news or dis-information, the corporate media, on both sides of the tribal divide, are all making bank from selling controversy, garbage, and fake outrage. And it’s not a surprise that the loudest of them screaming about censorship have had little to say about the most pervasive censorship of all–corporate media’s near-complete erasure of economic and anti-corruption reporting that might offend business sponsors.

You see, the powers that be don’t care if what you’re sharing is fact or fiction or something in between. What they care about is whether what you’re sharing has the potential to make people think for themselves and, in the process, question the government’s propaganda.

Honestly, the Russian-invasion propaganda has grown so unhinged that I think our elite are losing it

US warns war could be ‘imminent’ in Ukraine – Politico, Feb 11, 2022

Russian invasion could begin at any time, White House says – Reuters, Feb 14, 2022

WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE–U.S. Warns of Imminent Russian Invasion of Ukraine With Tanks, Jet Fighters, Cyberattacks

Maybe the propaganda blitz is all about domestic politics? Presently, the Democrats are battling for their political lives with midterm elections fast approaching in November. Facing rising inflation, the ravages of Omicron, blame for the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the failure to get the full support of his own party for the Build Back Better legislation, the Biden administration is staggering under sagging approval ratings just as it gears up for this year’s congressional elections.

Or maybe the Blob is flailing about attempting to maintain global hegemony in a multipolar world? Former MI-6 analyst Alastair Crooke points to this motive: “The U.S. is instigating conflict in Ukraine in order to tighten bloc discipline – to corral European States back into the U.S.-led fold. No doubt, China makes the connection that Ukraine provides the perfect pivot for shepherding Europe towards America’s next stage of requiring a united front with the U.S. for the later task of barricading-in China, behind her borders… The formula has acquired today a greater import, and a new twist: To keep Germany ‘down and price uncompetitive’ versus U.S. goods; to keep Russia ‘out’ from being Europe’s source of cheap energy; and to keep China ‘fenced out’ from EU–U.S. trade.”

I think that’s right. The geo-strategic reality is that the US would never would allow European-Russian, European-China relations to develop to such a degree that they would challenge the US’s political, economic or military primacy and hegemony on the European continent. Such a development will be prevented by all necessary means, if necessary by provoking a war in central Europe. 

Anyway, something is going on that has our elite freaking out, and I believe that’s why they are lashing out at any unauthorized narrative with a particular ferocity. 

The danger to the ruling elite is that any counter narrative that shines a light on their propaganda threatens their hold on power. The status quo is held in place by psychological compartmentalization. It’s held in place by propaganda and brute force, naturally, but it’s also equally propped up by the basic human tendency to avoid sincerely engaging with information that threatens to destroy our worldview.

Few people understand just how important it is for the powerful to control the narrative about what’s going on in the world. It’s the primary thing standing between the status quo and revolutionary change.

To paraphrase George Orwell–In a time of mis, dis and mal-information, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

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Culture War

Posted on February 12, 2022 by camelotkidd

So much of our political discourse focuses on cultural issues like race, sex and identity, rather than on class. Why is that?

Maybe the ongoing culture war is designed to obscure an enormous asset price bubble fueled by two years of stimulus money, that exists uneasily with an incredibly tenuous, pandemic-wracked real economy? Maybe it’s because both political parties remain incapable of providing tangible material benefits to the average American, while instead showering largess on the wealthy and the rapacious, monopolistic corporations who control them?

A functional nation would end gerrymandering, pass campaign finance reform, end the filibuster, abolish the undemocratic U.S. Senate, tax great wealth, institute public healthcare and build a social safety net to ensure that no one in our very wealthy country slipped all the way through the financial cracks of life and was ruined.

But that’s not the American way. The American way is to cheer on the few lucky ultra-rich people, and fete them as heroes, and aggressively encourage all Americans to emulate them, although such a thing is mathematically impossible. Since the 1970’s the wealthy and corporations they own have waged a vicious class war against American workers. America has de-industrialized as a deliberate policy of slashing production costs as its multinationals have sought low-wage labor abroad, most notably in China. This shift was not a rivalry with China, but was viewed as mutual gain. The rivalry was between U.S. employers and U.S. labor, and the class-war weapon was offshoring and, in the process, cutting back government social spending. This policy had the affect of deterring U.S. wages from rising by providing a source of low-priced labor to enable American manufacturers to offshore and outsource their production.

Meanwhile, you know that saying “They got you fighting a culture war to stop you fighting a class war” is something we’ve got to take seriously. You can’t just dismiss it. Because if any of this is true then the liberal identity politics is completely fucked and ultimately power-serving. Of course you can’t reduce everything to class. Racial and sexual power dynamics are very real. The issue would be if those in power kept everyone focused on culture war dynamics instead of class, and kept the discourse from threatening real power.

It seems to me that a majority of our political process concerns endless cultural issues designed to obscure the enormously important political and economic issues of the day while pitting American workers against each other so that they’re not able to focus their anger against the real villains–US bi-partisan elite.

In fact the Democrats–ostensibly the party of labor–were just as gung-ho for the cultural war as the Republicans, once they kicked workers to the curb for Wall Street. Hence the PR problem from hell. After all, if the Democrats are not for the little guy then what the hell good are they? The truth is that the Democrats are just fine with the results of their betrayal. The new constituents in finance, who provide them with millions in donations, are cool with cultural liberalism as long as Democrats don’t take away their carried interest loophole.

Meanwhile, the Republicans, have been perfecting their version of the cultural war since Richard Nixon ran on the Southern Strategy, where he used race to peel away Southern white voters from their traditional Democratic party. After Trump, the GOP has transformed into a proto-fascist, reactionary movement that stands against the institutions of our democratic society. This has been effective, ironically, because the sort of healthy institutions that would prevent culture war politics from being so powerful are the very institutions that are withering away or were deliberately jettisoned. Technological changes and the atomization of mainstream media have intensified our division into warring political camps, identity-based tribes that further radicalize electoral politics, and are in turn radicalized by it in a non-virtuous cycle.

The foundation of everything happening now is a sort of late capitalist nihilistic politics fueled purely by culture wars–an almost primitive flight from rationality driven by a half century of rising inequality and crumbling faith in ineffective public institutions. The US has become a “predator state” in which finance has gained the upper hand and co-opted democratic institutions to forward its narrow interests. The American dream is dead: Children no longer do reliably better than their parents. The dream of a one-income supported household is over. In its place have sprouted the gig economy, crushing student debt, the death of unions and generalized precarity. The rich are unimaginably richer, and everyone else is spinning their wheels.

This political/economic reality has left us vulnerable to right ring agitation in ways we really weren’t in the past, because the social contract has been broken. And with liberals solidly neoliberal and primarily concerned with identity politics, the hard-core of the left’s old power: people like truckers and miners and farmers have slipped over to the right, even though their material interests, at least, largely aren’t served there. The right panders to them culturally and not materially, while liberals despise them as uneducated and deplorable.

This has brought about a dynamic where the right is able to protest more effectively, (with the obvious example the ongoing truckers strike in Canada), while the left remains obsessed with identity politics.

Ian Welsh explains–“One of the reasons I didn’t condemn the strategy used by the truckers is simple: for a couple decades now I’ve been saying that this general sort of thing is what the left should do. Change happens only when you inflict real pain. In fact, the trucker protests aren’t that new, this sort of thing happens in France all the time. Truckers have big vehicles they can use to block roads in a way that’s harder to stop than a bunch of people just lining up or even chaining themselves up…In the neoliberal world order the right is legitimate, and so are neoliberals (our “center”) but the left and unions aren’t. It is OK to mess other people up in the name of right wing values, but not in the name of the left wing (economic, not social) values. There’s some tolerance for cultural left-wingism, since neoliberal elites are more than good with it, but not for economic left-wing populism.”

Since the onset of the pandemic, we’re starting to see a lot more left-wing labor agitation, but if American workers want change they too will have to inflict real pain on their corporate and political overlords.

That’s a topic for another time.

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Triple Play

Posted on February 4, 2022 by camelotkidd

Since 9/11 there have been three massive propaganda campaigns aimed at the American public.

The first one was the concerted effort to invade Iraq, where Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card, let the cat out of the bag with his admission that you “don’t introduce a new product in August.” The product being war, of course.

Then there was Russia-gate, where liberals were whipped into an FBI, CIA loving, war frenzy due to their overarching hatred of Donald Trump. Indeed, one of the most bizarre but important dynamics of Trump-era U.S. politics is that the most fanatical war-hungry neocons, who shaped Bush/Cheney militarism, have become the most popular pundits and thought leaders in American liberalism. They have not changed in the slightest as they are employing the same tactics they have always invoked, and for the same causes, but they have correctly perceived that their agenda is better served by migrating back to the Democratic Party which originally spawned their bloodthirsty ideology.

There’s been a lot of rehabilitation.

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And now there’s the hysterical propaganda campaign to bring about war with Russia over Ukraine, largely sponsored by the same fucking, bi-partisan cast of characters. It really is a Blob. All of the usual suspects are claiming that Russia has amassed over 100,000 combat troops near Ukraine’s eastern border and is threatening to invade and that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet Empire by expanding Russia’s territory beyond its borders.

But in truth the Blob and their corporate media buddies have concocted a fake storyline about a “Russian invasion” to divert attention from the US’s long-term geopolitical strategy of encircling, weakening and ultimately, splintering Russia into smaller pieces in order to become the dominant player in the development of Central Asia and in order to exert greater control over China’s explosive growth. Paging Halford Mackinder.

The invasion propaganda is also designed to obscure Moscow’s reasonable demands for legally-binding security guarantees that address the pressing issue of hostile foreign armies (NATO) and nuclear missiles on Russia’s doorstep. Russians do not want to live with nuclear missiles aimed at their Capital and located just a few hundred miles from their targets. That’s unacceptable. Nor do Russians want hostile armies and military bases looming on their western flank in Ukraine. 

Our official propagandists never let the reality get in the way of a good narrative, one that’s designed to “scare hell” out of the American public. “I think we’re basically just on the cusp of war,” retired lieutenant colonel Alexander Vindman, best known for his role in the Trump impeachment, told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Friday. “I think it’s all but certain in my mind that there’s going to be a large European war on the order of magnitude of World War II, with air power, sea power, massive ground force offensives, and my concern right now is making sure that the United States is postured for that outcome. I think there’s little to be done to avoid it at this point.”

Think about it. If Vindman’s claims are true then we should all be freaking-out and demanding our governments do everything possible to prevent a possible nuclear war from being unleashed upon our world. However, if his claims are not true then a US news network just aired brazen propaganda to further the war agenda. We should take very seriously the fact that they are working to insert these propaganda narratives into public consciousness.

Washington think-tanks and their corporate media fan-boys exist to factory-generate intellectual justifications for foreign interventions and wars, while attacking the appearance of ideas like the “peace dividend” that threaten to move any of their funding to some other constituency. Meanwhile, the neocon members of the Blob believe themselves impervious to error, and take extraordinary offense to challenges to their judgment, which is pretty fucking amazing given the spectacular failures in every arena from Iraq to Libya, Afghanistan to Syria.

And, what’s depressing is that after the invasion of Iraq and Russia-gate you would think Americans would have learned. Instead, American’s, as a general rule, remains absolutely clueless. Politicians and pundits feel free to claim with absolute certainty that Russia is about to launch an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine because five years of Russia hysteria have taught them that they will suffer exactly zero professional consequences when they’re proven wrong.

But there is no threat of a Russian invasion. Once again, it’s a massive propaganda campaign designed to stampede us to war. The only narrative, hammered 24/7, is “Russian aggression”. The corporate media is shaping a narrative to fit the policy which is the very description of state propaganda. Remember kids, in a corporatist system of government, corporate media is state media. 

Orwell would be impressed. Big Brother has been privatized.

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Performative Virtue Signaling

Posted on January 21, 2022 by camelotkidd

Why has the the modern Democratic Party become incapable of governing?

Perhaps it’s because the Democratic Party has become defined by a contradiction: it simultaneously promises policies that benefit its corporate donors while also solving problems created by those same donors. That dilemma gives us drug pricing policies that would not significantly reduce medicine prices, tax proposals that never actually address inequality, corporate handouts that further impoverish the working class, and health care policy that enriches the insurance companies already fleecing sick people.

Meanwhile, the modern Democratic Party has embraced identity politics to give the appearance of equality, liberalism and virtue. “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time,” Biden tweeted.

Because the professional/managerial/class (PMC) liberals that make up the modern Democratic Party seem to be forever engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself, and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program, we get shit like this. 

Instead of enacting universal policies that would improve all American’s lives the Democrats would rather virtue signal by posing in Kente cloth.

Look! Black Lives Matter!

Nothing would help black Americans more than Medicare-for-All but that would inconvenience Democratic donors in the medical/industrial/complex and their PMC apparatchiks. Nothing would help black Americans more than rent and mortgage relief but that would inconvenience Democratic donors in the real estate and banking sector. Nothing would help black Americans more than child-care support and paid family leave but that would inconvenience Democratic hawks who have earmarked these funds for a new Cold War with Russia.

The late, great Martin Luther King, who faced the ire of liberals for stepping out of his lane of civil rights to critique the criminality of the Vietnam War, had something to say about improving black Americans lives that is pertinent to the Democratic Party’s identity politics.

“It was easier to gain the right to vote, because it didn’t cost the Nation anything, and the fact is that we are dealing with issues now that will call for something of a restructuring of the architecture of American society. It is going to cost the Nation something.

We can’t talk about the economic problems the Negro confronts without talking about billions of dollars. We can’t end slums in the final analysis without the necessity to take profit out of slums. We can’t deal with the school situation in the final analysis without seeing that we are not only talking about integrating education, but we are talking about quality education, which means that millions of additional dollars will have to be spent to improve the whole education system of America.”

What was most attractive about identity politics for the Democrats was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people coming together in governments or unions. Instead, we were to understand poverty in the familiar terms of entrepreneurship and individual merit, as though the hard work of millions of single, unconnected people—plus cell phones, bank accounts, and a little capital—was what was required to remedy our vast institutional inequality.

Identity politics does permits all manner of networking, posturing, and profit taking among the Democratic donors while doing nothing to change actual power relations—the ultimate win-win. However, this is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with. But ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any discussion of the economic policies in question. The virtue quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a destructive empire risking nuclear war.

As you can see, performative virtue signaling is why the Democrat Party is incapable of governing, let alone politics. These tendencies were there with Russia-gate, but they are all the more strongly visible in Biden’s vaccination policy, where vaccination and virtue are equated. With Vax only, nothing more is required of liberal Democrats than, essentially, the consumption of a consumer product.

It’s why Biden’s signature domestic spending policy has been left for dead as party insiders blame it all on Bernie-Bro’s.

If you happened to be paying attention, Biden made all of this clear when he informed his richest donors that nothing fundamental will change.

Plus ça change.

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Your Health is in Your Hands

Posted on January 14, 2022 by camelotkidd

I’ve come to realize that the emphasis on vaccines to the exclusion of other public health measures is a neoliberal solution to the pandemic.

It is not hard to understand why the magic bullet of vaccines–to the exclusion of all else–has been so fervently grasped during the pandemic. Exclusive reliance on vaccines has been a great way for our corrupt, incompetent governments to show they know what they are doing. The vaccines have been an ideal way for corrupt medical-industrial corporations–including the biggest offender, Pfizer–to launder their images and make us feel all warm and fuzzy after so many earlier scandals, like Oxycontin and Vioxx. And, of course, the vaccines have been comforting to us, the public, promising to bring “Zero-Covid” (false), to provide long-term immunity (false), and to end transmission (false).

The Biden administration has maintained a pattern of declining to use its power and influence to promote public health measures beyond vaccination. They built their whole pandemic response around the fact that to be vaccine maximalists they would have to be public health minimalists. The entire pandemic response hinged on vaccination as a silver bullet. Meanwhile, they framed vaccination as a way to opt out of the pandemic while encouraging the vaccinated majority to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority, allowing our corrupt leaders to shift the blame away from themselves for their other failed public health policies and our corrupt “health” corporations to shift attention away from their profiteering. Divide and rule par excellence.

The Biden administration’s pandemic response would focus on vaccination and medical treatment while largely rejecting other public health measures ­– so-called “non-pharmaceutical intervention” policies ranging from masks, to contact tracing to mass testing to temporary closures of non-essential businesses. For the vaccinated and boosted, Biden’s message was: Keep Calm and Carry On, all will likely be fine. And for Wall Street, the speech was meant to provide a crucial piece of reassurance: There would be no federal support for public health measures that restrict commerce. Enacting a right to paid sick leave, especially  in the midst of a pandemic, should be a no-brainer, if our feral elite saw the needs of constituents as paramount.  Alas, it’s donor priorities that define the political agenda. So employers now insist on sick workers returning to the workplace, under threat of termination, no matter how sick – not to mention contagious – each may be.

Of course, that’s not how they see it.

Who ya gonna believe me or your lying eyes?

I’ve also come to realize that we will have to pry neoliberal market solutions from the cold-dead-hands of the modern Democratic Party.

Actions like rapid antigen testing, contact tracings, paid isolation, providing at home care and support to the isolated, installing improved ventilation in schools and public spaces are all community or society responses while vaccines are individual ones. Instead our “public health” officialdom spent the time banning early treatment of Covid and suppressing information about cheap and effective drugs — in the service of preserving the emergency use authorization and the concomitant liability shield for big-Pharma vaccines.

A perfect example of this neoliberal bent has been the way in which, rather than the US government mailing at home Covid tests to all Americans, the Biden plan has been for people to have to buy the tests then turn around and have to get reimbursement from their insurance companies. It’s the perfect blend of market based transactions and complications. What could go wrong? Meanwhile, people in jobs without insurance are the ones who need available tests the most!

What’s super crazy is that at this point everyone knows it’s an airborne virus that can infect anyone. Rich or poor. However, it appears that maintaining the power relationship between capital and labor is sacrosanct with public health a distant second. Just like in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, saving the banks took precedence over saving American homeowners. Going further, the dominant ideology in America seems to be that the private market can and will meet human needs, and that any expansion to public health care provision is an attack on business.

Our policy of saving the economy vs saving American citizens can be seen most clearly with this statistic. Last year in the US over 400,000 people died of COVID, while two people in China died of COVID. It says everything about our priorities. And the best part–our feral elite have seen the wealth explode during Covid even as hundreds of thousands have died. China’s leaders, “totalitarian tyrants”, as our corporate media never tires of reminding us, apparently cared enough about their population to stop Covid, even at economic cost. Our leaders, seeing that Covid was a huge profit opportunity (billionaire wealth has about doubled) decided that mass death and disabling was a cost they were happy for their “free” subjects to pay.

Our leaders kill and hurt us for money and power. That’s been their M.O. since Reagan and Thatcher took power.

Thatcher, articulated the justification: “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

In other words, it’s all on you the individual.

This was revealingly reflected in recent federal public health messaging, where personal responsibility and the individual choice to get vaccinated became the central themes. “Your health is in your hands,” CDC chief Rachel Walensky told the public.

Update: The hits keep coming

“In a mid-December interview, Vice President Kamala Harris attempted to defend the administration’s belated actions by claiming the White House “didn’t see Delta coming” and “didn’t see Omicron coming.”

But former federal vaccine scientist Rick Bright disputed Harris’ narrative, writing on Twitter that he personally warned the Biden transition team in December 2020 that ‘variants were coming and we needed plans and action immediately.’

‘They all knew,’ he added.”

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Failing Upward

Posted on January 7, 2022 by camelotkidd

It’s pretty rich that a lot of business and management books tend to be written by US military leaders even as they have a well documented record of failure.

Here’s how it works.

No American general has been disciplined for overseeing the catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor for lying to Congress about these disasters. The opposite has occurred. They have been promoted, and when they retire from the military, they tend to march into well-paid positions as board members in the weapons industry or Wall Street. The ongoing scandal has become so obscene that an Army officer who served two tours in Iraq wrote a now-famous article in 2007 that noted: “A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

It’s apparent that there’s been a total lack of accountability within the senior leadership of the U.S. military for Iraq and Afghanistan, among other disasters. Indeed, the generals have, almost to a man, cashed in, none more so than General Stanley McChrystal, who actually was fired for cause. The vast majority of today’s generals retire with six-figure pensions and go immediately to work for the military-industrial complex. In place of George Washington, their role model is a hedge fund buccaneer.

And, of course, generals like McChrystal write books about model leadership. That’s right, books on management excellence are written by losers, in a society that claims to be meritocratic. What does that say about us except that we have a culture of elite unaccountability?

We should not be surprised. America in 21st century excels in elite unaccountability. Just look at the number of bank CEOs who faced criminal charges after the 2008 financial collapse (zero), or the number of Sackler family members who were criminally charged after their company, Purdue Pharma, started an opioid epidemic with OxyContin that killed hundreds of thousands of citizens (also zero), or the number of billionaires who avoid paying income taxes (lots of them). And let’s not forget the politicians and pundits who engineered the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and suffered zero consequences. It’s not clear who takes their cues from whom, but it is obvious that all of our increasingly feral elite benefit from the con.

Most recently, Biden’s spokesperson scoffed at the idea of delivering free COVID tests to people’s homes, Biden’s consultants aided Big Pharma’s efforts to kill promised drug-pricing legislation, and Biden’s White House is promising no more stimulus legislation, no matter how much worse the pandemic gets. Meanwhile, the CEO of Delta Airlines asked the CDC to reduce the recommended quarantine time to 5 days and in an amazing coincidence the Biden Administration complied.

At this point, it’s obvious that Biden is advancing all Trump’s policies more effectively than Trump and actually doing things that Trump only talked about. But, of course, this dynamic is something that neither team red or blue will acknowledge. Instead it’s just more tribal nonsense about fascism or communism, ad nauseam.

Going further–our bi-partisan elite and their institutions, including the media are the real problem. This ongoing phenomenon bleeds into the decline not only in the performance of government but in the perception of its performance. All of the lack of accountability for our elite has had a corrosive effect of trust among Americans. Previously trusted authorities that we relied on to better understand the world are long gone. Which organization do you still trust? FBI? CIA? FEMA? DOJ? CBS? ABC? Fox? CNN? Before their behavior during the pandemic I would have said the CDC, FDA, and NIH. Now? Portions of those three should be razed.

As we navigate the Roaring 20’s the US is at real risk of becoming a failed state, largely because of the late-Soviet Union level of incompetence and venality of our elites, and the resulting failure of the government to handle crises and even operate as anything other than a vehicle for looting.

Our world is ultimately governed by physics, specifically gravity. As the old saying goes–what goes up, must come down. In other words: failing upwards won’t be an option for much longer.

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What if?

Posted on December 24, 2021 by camelotkidd

I’m fascinated by Hauntology, Mark Fisher’s formulation from his superb book–Capitalist Realism, where he wonders what would have been if there were an alternative to neoliberalism. Fisher feared that we were losing our ability to conceptualize a tomorrow that was radically different from our present and asks what happened to the future?

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, globalization, finance capital, mass consumerism, and mass media have asserted dominance over not just every sector of the world but of our social relations, our behavior and minds, our hopes and dreams. But this economic and cultural hegemony doesn’t exist purely in recognition of itself; its power and very presence is “haunted not by the apparition of the spectre of communism, but by its disappearance.”

What haunts us isn’t merely an imagined idyllic time before global market crashes, terrorism, and the constant interconnectedness of a digital, online world, but what might have been if the imposition and then acceleration of neoliberalism was frustrated by an alternative. Inundated and obsessed with the past and locked into a dismal present, we long for lost futures.

What if we had chosen a different path in response to the stagflation of the 1970’s? Perhaps a true democratic-republic with a robust, caring society, instead of a selfish neoliberal market economy?

In the US the dismal future of neoliberalism and capitalist realism was laid out forcefully with the Powell Memo. Corporate attorney and future Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell recognized the dangers of alternatives to capitalism, especially at the university setting. The the campus agitation and revolt of the 1960’s had made a strong impression on him and he argued for a response. The result was depressingly brilliant–make students pay for their education and their parents pay pay for everything else. Instead of publicly funded higher education, where arts, critical thinking and critique could flower, there would be debt. Instead of a strong safety net and web of infrastructure there would be the market, where you could pay for all the services of the state.

And now there’s another book out that examines how all of this turned out.

Neil Vallelly’s Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness is a polemic against the emptiness of the neoliberal era. It examines both its ideological roots, history, and political culture.

Neoliberals felt that by encasing the market from democratic pressures and disciplining the population by gutting agency-enhancing social programs, the narrow freedoms remaining to individuals — to compete and consume in the market — would lead them to become immeasurably more productive, often by necessity in a sink or swim world. They also believed (erroneously) that people would become much, much more creative when the nanny-state was eviscerated.

Instead neoliberalism has taken away a lot of creativity, joy and social interaction, things that make life worth living, because ultimately neoliberalism is a moral project. Neoliberalism from the beginning was conceived as a fundamentally moral project to make the world safer for property while fashioning individuals into entrepreneurs of the self.

The dark side to this is the responsibilization of the individual for all their problems, even those that don’t fall under their control. Worried about global warming? Don’t blame big oil, think of how often you tossed a can into the trash rather than recycle. Can’t get insurance or pay your medical bills? Consider cutting back on alcohol and bad food to save money and improve your health. The result was not just a depoliticization of life, but a dynamic of disempowerment through futility. As the 1 percent internalized the sense that they alone were responsible for their success, so too was everyone else made to feel like the cause of their own failure.

This leads to the sense of futility and emptiness Vallelly powerfully diagnoses as emblematic of neoliberal capitalism. Communities and political movements are disaggregated into atomized individuals and identities. If fact identity politics is the perfect embodiment of neoliberalism, something that liberals don’t want to discuss. Instead, individuals and groups are paradoxically made to feel that relentless but narrow self-improvement, the pursuit of wealth, power, and status within the system is all that matters, and that they are powerless to change that same system.

One of the most alienating features of neoliberalism is how it naturalizes history out of existence. Since there is “no alternative” to the world as it is, aesthetics becomes the endless recycling of cultural images and symbols from the past, a pastiche of postmodern nostalgia for a time where people could actually make a difference. Even language, arts and music becomes increasingly incapable of bearing the gravitas of meaning we need it to burdened as it has become by commercialization. The commodification of creativity is one of the hallmarks of neoliberalism, which has the frustrating ability to mutate faster than the forces that oppose it. The upshot is that our world has become increasingly inauthentic.

At this point, the very idea of the common good is under relentless attack. The real animus behind these attacks is hostility to the idea of the society, the notion that we should care about and for one another, the very idea that we have interests in common that we can and should address collectively, through government as well as other forms of social organization.

Since caring for one another is our natural state, a sustained program of propaganda is in place to convict us that the only values are wealth and self. Hence capitalist realism and Hauntology have come to dominate American culture even as everyone pretends to ignore it.

Even as Mark Fisher critiqued neoliberalism and capitalist realism while asking how its inconsistencies might be challenged, the toll that it took on him was always apparent. Unfortunately, Fisher articulated the feelings of sadness or despondency that seem increasingly common across the political spectrum. Finally, it was too much to bear. Suffering from depression and haunted by capitalist realism, Fisher committed suicide in 2017.

As we get ready to celebrate the birth of a true revolutionary, one who rejected the exploitive empire of his time, it’s more important than ever that we honor Fisher by agitating for an alternative to a system that seeks to reduce everything that was once regarded as personal or unique or holy to the status of interchangeable, salable commodities.

Merry Christmas.

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Madmen

Posted on December 17, 2021 by camelotkidd

We are ruled by madmen. And, as the recent appearance on Fox News by Senator Roger Wicker demonstrates, not very smart ones at that.

Wicker stated on a Tuesday Fox News appearance that he strongly supports keeping US military action on the table if Russia invades Ukraine, up to and including a first-use nuclear attack.

“I would not rule out military action,” Wicker told Fox News host Neil Cavuto. “I think we start making a mistake when we take options off the table. So I would hope the president keeps that option on the table.”

“What does military action mean, senator?” Cavuto asked.

“Well, military action could mean that we standoff with our ships in the Black Sea and we rain destruction on Russian military capability,” the senator replied. “It could mean that. It could mean that we participate – and I would not rule that out – I would not rule out American troops on the ground. You know we don’t rule out first-use nuclear action. We don’t think it will happen. But there’s certain things in negotiations – if you’re going to be tough – that you don’t take off the table.”

Wicker’s not just your average dim-witted senator, he’s on the Senate Armed Services Committee, where “supposedly” he gets briefs on Russian military capabilities. By his comments it’s obvious that he must have fallen asleep during the part in the briefing where they informed him that it’s not 1991 anymore and the US Navy cannot “standoff” with their ships in the Black Sea and “rain destruction on Russian military capability.”

Those days are long gone. Any US ship that enters the Black Sea has a life span of minutes thanks to advances in Russian military capabilities, especially hypersonic missile technology.

There’s a reason for these Russian military advances, by the way.

Anyone who has paid attention to US foreign policy since the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact alliance, 1989-91, would realize that America’s bipartisan foreign-policy elite has pursued a disastrous course of action. Despite promises to the contrary, that elite has led the charge to add members to the NATO alliance, taking the anti-Soviet military and political organization right up to the Russian border and staging military exercises uncomfortably close. Not only that but the U.S. has also stationed anti-missile weapons systems in NATO-member Poland, formerly a member of the Warsaw Pact, while arming and training the Ukrainian military, which is not a member of NATO.

Let’s also recall that in 2014 the U.S. stage-managed a neo-Nazi-supported coup against an elected, Russian-friendly president in Ukraine, knowing full well how the Russians would react. Fearing US/NATO encroachment, Putin’s government annexed Crimea with its strategic warm-water Black Sea naval base, which has been part of the Russian security system for over 200 years.

Traditionally it’s been the Republicans who’ve been the most Russophobic but since Trump and Russia-gate the Democrats have become even more fervent warmongers. Recently the Democrat-controlled House approved a $768 billion defense budget, $24 billion more than President Biden asked for, because why the hell not? We may have just put an end to our twenty-year misadventure in Afghanistan, but the power of the military/industrial/complex necessitates that we agitate for military confrontations with Russia over Ukraine.

Putin insists that NATO not expand any further, but the US position is that NATO’s inclusion of former Soviet possessions is purely an alliance affair. Meanwhile, Biden threatens more harsh economic sanctions and even more US troops to Eastern Europe if Putin doesn’t acquiesce by, among other things, moving his troops away from the Russia-Ukraine border.

Would the Biden administration then back down or go nuclear? Who is eager to find out? Those considerations aside, the U.S. government should simply stop fanning the Russophobic flames simply because a war would be incredibly stupid.

Nevertheless, it could possibly be, therefore, that reckless hawks in the U.S. establishment might in fact engineer some form of military intervention in Ukraine. While Senator Wicker is stupid, his gambit represents the domestic aspect of US foreign policy. Any compromise with Russia over Ukraine, risks Biden being seen as weak. Republicans already pre-emptively have blamed what they call Biden’s ‘weakness’ for having encouraged ‘dangerous adventurism’ from Moscow.

Talk about projection.

If this were to occur, the results would be catastrophic. Quite apart from the risk of nuclear war, Russian forces colossally outnumber not just the Ukrainians, but any forces that the United States and NATO could or would deploy quickly in Ukraine, and would therefore win a ground war with NATO. 

Rather than repelling a Russian offensive, the United States would therefore be faced with the prospect of planning a great and horribly bloody war to recover lost Ukrainian territory. This would also risk becoming a world war; for it is virtually certain that China would exploit a war between the United States and Russia, thereby threatening the United States with the risk of two wars simultaneously – and defeat in both.

To put all of this into context, recalcitrant Democratic Senators, led by Joe Manchin, balk at spending on domestic priorities with Build Back Better, yet have zero qualms about spending untold billions on a possible war in Ukraine, a place that few Americans could find on a map.

Of course, with the madmen we have as leaders, war could easily happen by accident because of a combination of hubris, American exceptionalism and ignorance.

While it’s only fair to give a shout out to our madwomen here and here and here, the fact remains that it’s mostly the madmen driving the war train.

Then there’s the undeniable fact that our rulers are impoverishing and killing us, because it benefits them. This is America, where Amazon workers are barred from leaving the warehouse as an F-3 tornado barrels toward them, and where if your kid gets cancer you have to sell your house and live in your car.

So that raises a question. Are the madmen and women that rule us incompetent or evil?

Why not both?

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