Who is it good for?

Posted on March 19, 2021 by camelotkidd

My liberal friends and family are exited about the Biden administration’s domestic policies: the $1400 checks; the assistance to children; potential infrastructure spending; and progressive cabinet picks. The liberal corporate media, exemplified by the New York Times, probably has something to do with it. For example, the ridiculous accolades about the Biden administration’s pathetic, paltry relief package demonstrates how the corporate media is in the bag for the new administration after their horror at Trump.

There is little mention, however, of Biden’s foreign policies.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration appears to be moving towards war in a number of areas. Not war, where the US commits troops–silly. Those days are over thanks to the ham-fisted efforts of the Bush neocons: the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Now the US wages war via proxy with some special-forces training super-sauce, covert weapons provision and support.

I’ve discussed it before but my method to make sense of our world is to watch the movements of money, resources, weapons, and ignore all the corporate media narrative.

Following that logic, it sure looks like the US is determined to continue a Cold War with Russia.

They’re hardly being shy about it.

A new report from the US National Intelligence Council assesses that Russia attempted to meddle, once again, in our sacred elections. “We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US,” the report informs us. “The Biden admin is expected to announce sanctions related to election interference as soon as next week,” sources say.

To no ones surprise, this completely unevidenced narrative is being used to justify support for increased “defense” spending, and new Cold War escalations. Going further, I believe that this report is a continuation of Russia-gate despite the failure of the three-year Mueller investigation to find a scrap of evidence. Also, to no ones surprise, the corporate media all rushed to treat it as gospel: no questioning of it, no skepticism, no demands to see evidence for it, not even any acknowledgement that no evidence was provided. They just instantly enshrined claims from US intelligence agencies as Truth. 

One of the features of this new and improved Cold War is to provoke multiple crisises in the former Soviet republics. From the Balkans to Georgia to Armenia to Belarus, well, you get the picture.

Yet nowhere is the potential for violence greater than in the Ukraine. Several Russia watchers – Patrick Armstrong, Andrei Martyanov and Andrei Raevsky–are warning of a renewed attack by the government of Ukraine on its eastern Donbass region. The Donbass separated in 2014 after the U.S. driven coup in Kiev installed an anti-Russian government which then waged a war on its ethnic Russian east.

To make sense of this it’s crucial to remember that Washington’s role in the ouster of the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was democratically elected, caused Russia to annex Crimea, rather than the oft repeated canard about the Russians “invading”. The US fully supported the opposition in Ukraine during demonstrations in 2013 and 2014, an opposition that even had a neo-nazi element. They were hardly shy about it. A few weeks before Yanukovych was forced out, a recording of a phone call between then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt and Victoria Nuland, who was working in the State Department at the time, was leaked and released on YouTube.  In the now-infamous phone call, Nuland and Pyatt discussed who should replace the government of Yanukovych.

Like the ethnic Russians in Crimea, the ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region vehemently rejected the post-coup government in Kyiv, sparking the war that has killed tens of thousands. The context of US involvement in the coup that sparked these events is crucial, especially when discussing US foreign policy in the years since the dissolution of the USSR with the maniacal focus on color revolutions and regime change. There’s an argument to be made that neither the annexation of Crimea nor the war in the Donbas would have happened the way it did if not for US intervention.

Since the coup, the Ukrainian military has received a great deal of assistance from the US, both in terms of equipment/money and in terms of training. And now, most ominously, there are clear signs that the Ukrainian military is moving heavy forces towards the line of contact in the Donbas.

What would happen if the Ukrainians restart the conflict and attack? I’ve come to believe that the real point of a Ukrainian attack on the Donbass would not be reconquer the region, but to force Russia to openly and, therefore, undeniably intervene. This is the Biden administration’s unspoken objective and has been a Neocon wet dream since 2014 and it is still their ultimate endgame. 

Thus nothing will happen on the frontline without the consent or even encouragement from Washington DC. The Biden administration is filled with the same delusional people who managed the 2014 coup in Kiev. They may believe that the NATO training the Ukrainian army received and the weapons the U.S. delivered are sufficient to defeat the separatist. But the state of the Ukrainian military is worse than one might think and the separatist will have Russia’s full backing. There is no question who would win in such a fight.

Perhaps updating Edwin Starr’s classic R&B hit to War (Who is it good for?) would help provide a clue as to why the US seems determined to accelerate a new Cold War that threatens to turn hot at any time. The Military/Industrial/Complex (MIC), with its interlocking nodes in every congressional district, spurred on by the financial aristocracy on Wall Street, is the ultimate beneficiary of any such conflict, with trillions of dollars at stake. While a continuation of the Cold War with Russia does nothing for the average American, for the MIC–war is good for them. Very good. As the saying goes–there’s gold-in-them-thar-hills.

The MIC depends on influential think-tanks for its ideological justification and legitimacy, and a great representation of the MIC’s ideology would be the Atlantic Council. The think tank receives contributions from the top US weapons makers, including Raytheon, General Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. The Atlantic Council is also funded by NATO, an alliance that has an interest in keeping tensions high and presenting Russia’s annexation of Crimea as an unprovoked “invasion.”

Red and blue partisans are equally convinced that their team is on the side of the angels, while the other team is the devil incarnate. However, observing our bipartisan foreign policy suggests that the both have a passing familiarity with Satan.

How surprising.

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Invisible Government

Posted on March 13, 2021 by camelotkidd

Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays and the other social scientists who made up the Creel Commission developed the techniques of advertising, public relations and propaganda. These men manipulated the American public into World War I at the behest of US and British bankers.

Wait. World War I wasn’t about freedom and democracy?

No.

US President Woodrow Wilson, who ran on a platform of neutrality, was desperate to fulfill his obligations to these bankers, who stood to lose everything if Germany should prevail, by putting the US into the war as they wished. But Wilson was having little success with public opinion at home as few Americans wanted to enter the European conflagration. In 1917 Wilson founded what was called The Committee on Public Information, or more commonly known as the Creel Commission after the name of the leader of the commission. They used every weapon available to spread their message to, as George Creel would later say, “turn the American people into one white-hot mass of hatred . . .”

It’s not too much to say that the Creel Commission shaped our modern world beyond our knowledge, creating a cluster of images and ideas so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination. It is impossible to fundamentally grasp the social, political, economic and cultural developments of the past 100 years without some understanding of their legacy. Everything we have seen, read, or heard that demonized other nations, usually leading to military intervention or “color revolutions”, stems from their template.

The propaganda they developed drives the entirety of US foreign policy on the global stage today. No ordinary American benefits from the US having troops in Syria, sanctioning Venezuelans to death, supporting Saudi Arabia while it destroys Yemen, garrisoning the planet with military bases and working to subvert any nation which refuses to bow to its diktats.

The only way to get Americans to consent to any of these agendas is to propagandize them into doing so.

Until the First World War, these theories of creating an entirely false public opinion based on misinformation, then manipulating this for population control, were still only theories, but the astounding success of propaganda by Bernays and his group during the war laid bare the possibilities of perpetually controlling the public mind on all matters.

In his main work titled Propaganda, which he wrote in 1928, Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy in which individuals were inherently dangerous (to the elite control of America) but could be harnessed and channeled by these same elites for their economic benefit. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, was apparently stunned by the outstanding success of the Creel Commission in swaying public opinion in favor of war, and so immediately began to apply his model to peacetime enterprises. For example, he deployed the same techniques of manipulation to encourage cigarette smoking amongst woman, with his Torches of Freedom advertising campaign.

The propaganda developed by the Creel Commission is the single most overlooked and under-emphasized aspect of our society, bar none. It’s so pervasive that most of us don’t even notice it. It’s like that old joke about the two fish who are asked “How’s the water?” and then turn to each other and say “What’s water?”

Most American vehemently reject out of hand the notion that they are propagandized. They consider themselves “rugged individuals” who make up their own damn mind, without any pointy-headed, psychologists funny ideas, thank-you very much.

They would be wrong. Propaganda is as American as apple pie. This is what led CIA Director William Casey to state, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” 

I’ve personally witnessed four propaganda campaigns designed to whip Americans into a war fever. The first Gulf War, where the conflict was sold to the American public by the Rendon Group. The invasion of Iraq, where the men who sold the war were so sure of the outcome that they could boast that “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Russia-gate, which I’ve written about exhaustedly; and now the, ongoing effort to demonize China.

The latest polling data on American’s attitudes towards Russia and China demonstrates just how powerful our all-American propaganda system is.

US military force is never, ever conducted with the American people’s informed consent. Literally never. Consent is always manufactured for US wars by lies and mass media propaganda, one hundred percent of the time, without exception. The bigger the military operation, the more egregious the deceit used to manufacture consent for it. 

Americans are subject to a nonstop deluge of distorted and outright false narratives about their military and the nations it targets for destruction. Every aspect of the US-centralized power alliance is propped up by a relentless deluge of mass-scale propaganda that was scientifically refined by Bernays and Lippmann.

It’s getting worse.

The increasing censorship on the internet and control over information is but one manifestation of elite fear of popular rage and desperation. So, too, is the related attempt by the corporate media to regain their monopoly over news and discourse by discrediting anyone in opposition to them. It’s why Julian Assange rots in a British prison.

Indeed, the increasingly despised corporate elite will seek to weaken that which most threatens their interests and power: a discourse and a democracy that they can no longer manipulate and control. After all, if you let people think for themselves, you lose the ability to control everything.

All our major problems are caused by a lack of awareness and can be alleviated by exposing the “invisible government” that manipulates our country. This is why fighting propaganda, opposing censorship, protecting press freedoms and exposing the truth of what’s really going on in our world is so important.

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On a path towards radicalization

Posted on March 5, 2021 by camelotkidd

I’ve always been fascinated by understanding how our world really works. Not the bedtime stories told by our parents, teachers and corporate media talking-heads but the real events that shape our world. It’s why I try to read everything I can get my hands on from a disparate variety of sources.

These bedtime stories, better known as propaganda, buttress the official narrative promulgated by our corporate deep-state. Unfortunately, the political, economic and media elite have come to believe this propaganda after decades of marinating in it.

Thus, no viable ideas or solutions to the current unfolding economic, social and cultural catastrophe can originate within this elite, who see the world only through a New York Times or Washington Post lens. 

Instead the elite are solely focused on maintaining their wealth, power and status as America disintegrates. And why wouldn’t they? Generations of bi-partisan economic policies have left the 1% not only in possession of massively increased wealth, but also political power. 

Time magazine’s article on this dynamic is remarkably direct: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% — And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure.

“The $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn’t inevitable; it was a choice–a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people.”

For our corporate media the focus is not on the way in which our country has been looted but on how they as the gatekeepers are being disrespected. Seriously. You can’t make this shit up.

I think it’s a little too late for that nonsense. Most Americans have lost faith in the feral elite and their institutions. Going further, they’ve come to understand that traditional news outlets like the Times and Post have become tools of the very corporate and political interests they’re supposed to be overseeing. Indeed, the corporate media has become increasingly, arrogantly dysfunctional as traditional competition in the form of local newspapers and urban alt-weeklies has died out.

Americans increasingly sense the vast betrayal. In the middle of a pandemic they feel vulnerable and afraid. More than that they feel an inchoate rage at being abandoned by their putative leaders. People give different reasons for that unhappiness but the broad mass of America is getting pretty ready to rip the place apart. This rage is often expressed as hatred of foreigners or those who are different or vengeance against scapegoats, religious and ethnic chauvinism and nihilistic violence. It drives the tribal hatred that powers both sides of the corporate media, who monetizes this hate to sell ads. It drives Americans into the arms of rancid and insincere populists like Donald Trump.

The Biden administration, in the thrall of neoliberal Austerians, has reduced the promised checks from $2000 to $1400 that will be means-tested. The eviction and foreclosure bans, debt relief and enhanced unemployment insurance are all about to end, replaced with nothing. The gig economy appears to be the future of work, fueled by the recent California Proposition 22. Millions will lose healthcare.

And now, just in time, the liberal intelligentsia has proclaimed that the real villain is Dr. Seuss. 

Unfortunately it’s a dangerous time to be such a trenchant critic. The last 4 years of the Trump administration have demonstrated that any person criticizing America along similar lines, must therefore be a Russian agent or a traitor or, worst of all–on the path towards radicalization. For example, in America, you cannot be patriotic while condemning neoliberal capitalism or the frequent wars for empire, and it is distinctly unpatriotic to express a wish for a single-payer healthcare system or to protest against the banksters who caused much of the population to lose their homes in 2008. 

Yet, to fail to act, and to protest this state of affairs is a form of spiritual death. It means succumbing to nihilism, cynicism and ultimately numbness, robbing us of our humanity. It’s to be an accomplice.

To refuse to cooperate and protest is the path to maintaining our humanity, our personal autonomy and life itself. Rebellion is its own justification, especially against the theatre of cruelty our feral elite have constructed to oppress us. Rebellion helps keep alive the hope that there can be an alternative.

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Go Die

Posted on February 25, 2021 by camelotkidd

The Texas black-out debacle is providing as pure an expression of neoliberalism that I’ve seen. The two simple rules of neoliberalism are Rule #1: Because markets. Rule #2: Go die!

As Texas battles a severe snowstorm and mass power outages, Tim Boyd, the now-former Republican mayor of Colorado City, revealed his party’s plan for the deadly extreme temperatures linked to climate change. In a lengthy Facebook post that was deleted soon after it went viral, then-Mayor Boyd told his residents that they were entirely on their own as the brutal winter weather caused mayhem and deaths across the Lone Star state.

His outburst was revealing. “Sink or swim it’s your choice!” he wrote. “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! Only the strong will survive and the weak will perish.” For such honesty to come from the elected leader of a city–a man literally chosen by his people to ensure that local government works for them–was shocking.

What was not shocking was that conservative ideologues immediately blamed communist windmills and non-existent Green-New-Deals for the loss of power. However, while the non-weatherized windmills went offline, they were a small part of the story. The real story is that millions of Texans have suffered the effects of a design, invented by economists, aided by a myth, that served the fossil fuel industry and the politicians it funds. One of these politicians, US Senator Ted Cruz, acted in perfect synchronicity with the system’s free-market logic by leaving for Cancún. Meanwhile, former Governor Rick Perry claims that Texans are prepared to sacrifice themselves to avoid the curse of socialism. 

How noble.

The conservative mindset can be counted on to prioritize private interests over public ones. In a Republican utopia, the rich are noble and deserving of basic necessities, comforts, and life itself. If they have rigged the system to benefit themselves, it means they are smart, not conniving. In the future that Republicans promise, “Only the strong will survive and the weak will perish,” as Boyd stated. Our lives are expendable, and if we die, it is because we deserve it and we were not smart enough to survive.

Meanwhile, Democrats, while not as callous, are also down with organizing our country according to the rules of neoliberalism. Take education, another public service that has been privatized through the use of tax credits and charter school funding. Both Republican, Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos and Democratic, Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan believe fervently in the magic of private charter schools with the only difference being that Arne knows to keep the sociopathy on the down-low while Betsy expresses it full-throatedly.

What this latest tragedy makes blindingly obvious is that the 2 rules of neoliberalism apply unevenly. The 1% and their economic and political allies are not held to the same market logic as the rest of us. No, it’s socialism and a vacation in Mexico for them, while the savagery of the “free market” is reserved for the rest of us. And, they certainly don’t go die. They and their malign offspring live forever.

What’s also become apparent is that what happened in Texas is not a bug but a feature. Neoliberalism is an ideology that prioritizes profits above people and maintains that the “market” is sacrosanct then describes its brutality as the workings of the “Invisible Hand”. All of this to keep you afraid of what could happen in case you lose your job or insurance or can’t make rent and end up living under a bridge. Death and suffering isn’t an accidental outcome or an oversight–it’s part of the plan.

What all this means is that if you reside in a neoliberal austerity country like the US, which has spent 40 years de-regulating and privatizing public infrastructure and downsizing the public service into incapability, you end up with a situation where you can’t count on the State for water, food, or power during emergencies.

In the meantime our elected leaders are literally hoping you go die.

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Of the erosion of international norms of war and the Western commitment to them

Posted on February 18, 2021 by camelotkidd

For the last five years we’ve been bombarded by story after story of Trump being a secret Russian agent directed personally by Vladimir Putin, while the Russians are portrayed as being particularly villainous.

Why, dear reader, do you think that is?

I believe that this propaganda campaign is in direct response to the maneuvers of the Russian military to stymie the US empire in the Ukraine and in Syria. But Russia, as a country free from the clutches of the American empire, would always be targeted. Going further, the deep state that manages US foreign policy, irrespective of parties or personal, attacked Trump with Russia-gate for his declaration to improve relations between the two nuclear armed super-powers.

I like to read. In so doing I try to follow the example of the legendary citizen journalist Izzy Stone. Stone didn’t bother trying to interview government officials or cultivate sources. He simply read official government documents and used his critical thinking to question the official “narrative”. I’m also partial to C. Wright Mills term “crackpot realism” that he used during the first Cold War as a way to describe the insanity of our leaders.

In 2019 a report from the Pentagon centric RAND think-tank, evaluated how to best ‘unbalance and overextend’ Russia. In the end it was clearly aimed at regime change in Russia, or if not otherwise possible, war.

Meanwhile, Gabriel Felbermayr, the president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, was asked by a German radio station about new sanctions the EU might impose on Russia. He is skeptic that those might work because: The aims we have towards Russia are very big. We do not want anything less but regime change in Russia, which is difficult to achieve by economic pressure.

President Biden’s new pick to be the Under-Secretary of the State Department was the author of a very interesting  final report that was presented to Congress in September 2019 by the Syria Study Group: “…The threats the conflict in Syria poses—of terrorism directed against the United States and its allies and partners; of an empowered Iran; of an aggrandized Russia; of large numbers of refugees, displaced persons, and other forms of humanitarian catastrophe; and of the erosion of international norms of war and the Western commitment to them—are sufficiently serious to merit a determined response from the United States. The United States underestimated Russia’s ability to use Syria as an arena for regional influence. Russia’s intervention, beginning in 2015, accomplished its proximate aim—the preservation of the regime in defiance of U.S. calls for Assad to ‘go’—at a relatively low cost. Russia has enhanced its profile and prestige more broadly in the Middle East.

What goes unmentioned in this report is that Russia intervened in both Syria and Crimea as a direct response to US regime change actions. The US, despite its commitment to the “international norms of war”, utilized al Qaeda terrorists in its campaign to oust Syria’s Assad, and neo-Nazi’s in the Ukrainian coup.

Despite this being an open secret, a DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with insurgent militias in Syria, overturning a lower court’s previous ruling in favor of a Buzzfeed News reporter seeking such documents.

As Sputnik‘s Morgan Artyukhina clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the CIA’s activities in Syria for years, and despite a US president having openly tweeted about those activities.

Indeed, it’s public knowledge that the CIA trained, armed and directed these violent jihadists as part of Timber Sycamore. It’s public knowledge that the CIA has a well-documented history of doing extremely evil things. And it’s public knowledge that the US government has long sought control over Syria.

The US empire deploys the military, intelligence agencies and regime-change NGO’s like the National Endowment for Democracy for three main reasons: (1) to forcibly open up countries to foreign investment, (2) to ensure the free flow of natural resources into the hands of multinational corporations, and (3) because war is profitable.

And now the Biden administration, as evidenced by its endless coterie of neocon picks to staff their foreign policy, is demonstrating that they are set to resume the very same evil policies that make a mockery of the their commitment to “international norms of war”.

What’s beyond insane is that this extraordinary contradiction can go unnoticed for years while Washington justifies bombing and dispossessing millions of people in eight countries as “bringing them democracy”.

We are so living in George Orwell’s 1984, where we’ve always been at war with East Asia, while Newspeak limits our ability to think and articulate subversive concepts such as those expressed on this blog.

Hope that doesn’t’t make me a “domestic terrorist”.

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Hedge Fund Nation

Posted on February 12, 2021 by camelotkidd

It has become apparent that we are ruled by economic sociopaths, more commonly known as hedge funds.

This dynamic has not gone unnoticed. A new survey suggests the GameStop saga has become a very real lightning rod for anti–Wall Street sentiment. In her introduction to the study, Morning Consult reporter Claire Williams was unequivocal: “One of the biggest takeaways of the GameStop Corp. market mayhem so far, according to new Morning Consult polling, is that Wall Street remains the public’s top villain.”

In an amazing new article Matt Taibbi finds that one Reddit investor saw GameStop as a way to send a message to this “villain”.

This is just a small sample but it speaks to a larger truth–Americans increasingly hate Wall Street and especially hedge funds. Millions of Americans have come to correctly recognize that Wall Street is antagonistic to their interests. Of course the pandemic has only poured fuel on this sentiment–the astonishing boom enjoyed by major corporations and financial firms amid widespread poverty and unemployment is highlighting yet again just how severed from the country the Wall Street prosperity really is.

The economic damage is literally incalculable–millions have been plunged into desperate poverty, countless independent businesses crushed, whole industries crippled, as billionaires amassed over $1 trillion in wealth and their vehicles for enrichment–hedge funds–consolidate their dominance over our country.

A recent headline in our local paper–Hedging Bets on Water’s Future–detailed the extent of our subservience to the new financial lords. “Hedge funds and other Wall Street interests want to rewrite the ‘Law of the River’ in the Colorado River Basin and use the free market to solve the problem of scarcity–while potentially raking in immense profits”

I’m sure that letting hedge funds get their hand on our water supply will work out swimmingly. (Pun intended). Perhaps the citizens of Flint Michigan can offer up a lesson or two on such folly?

The financial world we live in is the end result of neoliberalism – a financialized world order that intends to privatize all infrastructure and create monopoly rents for transportation, education, healthcare, and let banks and hedge funds control our economy. Presently our economy is based largely on debt and asset price bubbles.

Heterodox economist Michael Hudson says that, “in the United States the center of economic planning has been shifted from Washington to Wall Street financial institutions.” These financial parasites goal is “to take it over and turn public infrastructure – the education system, healthcare, transportation and communications – into rent extraction devices. The American economy is no longer a productive economy. It is a rent-seeking economy.

All of it was brought about by decisions to favor finance over the real economy, starting with the decision to offshore American manufacturing. Offshoring served the interests of corporate executives and shareholders. The lower labor costs raised profits and, thereby, executive bonuses and the prices of the stocks, resulting in capital gains for shareholders. These benefits accrued to a small percentage of the population. For everyone else these closely held benefits imposed huge external costs many times greater than the rise in profits.

The offshoring of high productivity, high value-added manufacturing jobs reduced American incomes, US aggregate domestic demand was impacted and economic growth fell. The Federal Reserve expanded credit and substituted an increase in consumer debt for the missing growth in consumer income, while the effective zero percent interest rates extended to Wall Street in the wake of the Crash of 2008 blew an enormous asset bubble inhaled by our ruling plutocracy.

As incomes fell for the bulk of the American population, incomes rose for the financial 1%. Income and wealth gains have been concentrated at the top resulting in the United States today having one of the most unequal distributions of income and wealth in the world.

This is the milieu we inhabit. A hedge fund nation, where the well-heeled perpetrators–the ones who crash our economy and invade and destroy countries–fail upwards, while the rest of us sink downwards.

Update: Chris Arnade, who writes of the devastation visited on our country by the economic sociopaths, predicts where this all goes.

“The lesson taken away by those losers, and everyone else not on Wall Street, is more important, insightful, and dangerous though. It will be that there isn’t a meritocracy, or at least a justified one. It will be that everyone is just playing games. Those at the top get to dress up their game, even though it is destructive to everyone else, as legitimate, call playing it a career, and get rewarded mightily for it. Others, like them, have to make it a hobby, and even though it is just harmless fun, get scolded for it.

This will harden a cynicism that already exists in large parts of America. A cynicism that will convince more and more people to play all of their life, recklessly. To do what is known in gaming circles, as Int-ing, or Intentionally dying. Running madly at the boss, unworried if they are going to lose, suffer, or die.

Because if you are not going to be allowed to win a rigged game, you might as well ruin it, and extract just a tiny moment of joy from that.”

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Friends and Family

Posted on February 6, 2021 by camelotkidd

There was a meme a few years back during the Obama administration where liberals were encouraged to relate how they had lost a family member to Fox News propaganda.

During the Trump administration the narrative managers flipped the script, with the New York Times taking on the role of Fox News.

While the Fox News watching cohort believed all of the rumors and innuendos about Obama’s citizenship, with the whole Birther thing, the friends and family reading the Times have come to believe all of the rumors and innuendos about Trump being a Russian agent and Putin specifically as some sort of super-villain who has personally soiled American democracy.

What’s been the most craziest thing is that these liberals have come to see the CIA as a Resistance hero against the dastardly Trump. They were aghast because the poor CIA had been maligned and disrespected by Trump, who (among other things) claimed it exaggerated the role played by Russia in the 2016 election.

Not long ago, the CIA was viewed with disgust by like-minded liberals. It was the government agency that overthrew foreign governments, deceived and misled people in distant lands and fought for dictatorship around the world. Its list of crimes against democracy was long and disturbing.

But over the last four years this picture changed completely. Now liberals love them some CIA.

The CIA. Crazy, I know.

If it wasn’t so disconcerting and frankly sad it would be quite funny. But I love my family and friends and struggle with how to confront them. Or not. A recent interaction with a dear friend has led me to write this in hope that readers can relate their own stories of Times reading liberals.

A huge problem is the fracturing of information sources which has basically broken a certain fundamental consensus about reality. Narrative and reality are becoming further and further apart.

I don’t think that’s an accident. Furthermore, I’ve come to view Russia-gate as instrumental to the process.

The basic element of the scandal was ‘collusion’: that Trump had in some way conspired with or been compromised by the Russian government as it tried to intervene in the 2016 election. Which was to say that Trump was not merely incompetent or crooked but he was the agent of a hostile foreign power.

This was the dominant news story day in and day out during the Trump years, and revelations of his guilt were always, just around the corner. But somehow never quite revealed. Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted several Republican officials for other offenses, but he prosecuted no one for coordination or conspiracy with the Russian government. His report concluded in March 2019: ‘Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election-interference activities’.

So the most heavily covered story of a monstrous Trump scandal turned out to not be true. Talk about journalism malfeasance. In the fervor to bring down a president they despised, the people of the press gave up any pretence of fairness or balance. They did not try to conceal this change, but bragged about it as some sort of moral choice made necessary by Trump’s constant lying.

A new article entitled–Slouching Towards Post-Journalism, helps make sense of the new face of liberal media. It describes how with the election of Trump the New York Times and other elite media outlets have openly embraced advocacy over reporting.

“During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Times stumbled onto a possible answer. It entailed a wrenching pivot from a journalism of fact to a “post-journalism” of opinion—a term coined, in his book of that title, by media scholar Andrey Mir. Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls. Post-journalism “mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business necessity required for the media to survive,” Mir observes. The new business model required a new style of reporting. Its language aimed to commodify polarization and threat: journalists had to “scare the audience to make it donate.” At stake was survival in the digital storm.”

Hopefully, this will clear up a few mysteries about your own friends and family’s behavior during the last 4 years.

The corporate media exists for a reason and the surest way to get rich in this environment is to spread lies which serve the interests of the powerful. It’s becoming more and more like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, with our establishment news regularly dishing out Two Minutes Hate pieces to us to demonize countries like Russia.

I believe that a true intellectual should spend his or her time criticizing their own country–its ruling ideologies, dominant culture, foreign and domestic policies–especially when their own country is the most powerful and destructive government on earth. Critiquing another country, especially one that the dominant hegemon has been trying to absorb into its empire makes one an accomplice in the dissemination of propaganda.

But, that’s just me.

Update: Now that I’ve lost my friends and family to the Gray Lady I wonder if I can get a discount on my online subscription?

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Tag-Team

Posted on January 28, 2021 by camelotkidd

Liberals are in for a rude awakening with the blue team in charge where they can’t blame everything on Trump. (Of course, they will still blame the Russians but that’s another story.) Now all of the devastating economic and foreign policies of the US empire are theirs. They own it all.

Luckily they will be shielded from this reality thanks to the heroic efforts of the corporate media, who are already fawning over the new administration. Indeed, the Biden inauguration has been treated like the Second Coming of Christ.

What’s fascinating is that we’ve seen this movie before. Bill Clinton followed the horrible Reagan/Bush administrations and was lionized by the corporate media even as he codified the Reagan revolution and turbo-charged neoliberalism. Barack Obama followed a murderous George W. Bush administration and normalized torture, assassinations and drone strikes against American citizens while failing to crackdown on Wall Street after the financial crisis and sub-prime housing meltdown because that might have required “violence to the social order.”

And now we get Biden, who already readying a domestic War-on Terror against half of the country that voted for Trump, while promising his wealthy donors that “nothing will change”. Moreover it appears that the Biden administration is determined to protect the continuity of U.S. never-ending war policies and regime-change machinations. Indeed, after 4 plus years of Russia-gate it’s clear that the Democrats have become the more aggressive party.

If the Democrat’s and by extension liberals really were the “good guys” they imagine themselves to be there would be a modicum of hope. But liberals and Democrat’s are rotten too, in a different way to be sure, but as will soon be all too apparent. Thanks to the efforts of successive Democratic administrations, it’s hard to imagine an alternative to our bi-partisan tag-team. Thus the Biden administration represents the final triumph of neoliberalism with its withering of the state leaving only its core military and police functions intact.

Neoliberalism should be thought of as a political project, re-establishing the conditions for capital accumulation while restoring the power of economic elites. It’s important to stress that the “liberalism” of neoliberalism refers to economic rather than political liberalism.

My critics rightly insist that the Republicans are much worse but that misses the point. The Republicans don’t pretend to be something they are not like the Democrats do. The Democrats have come to resemble the compradore elite that the US empire uses to maintain control over its colonies. They pretend to be patriotic and loyal to their citizens but in actuality function as agents for exploitation. Moreover, they are traitors who sold out the country for the wealth and power.

So, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t view Biden’s victory as a triumph of light over darkness the way so many corporate media writers and commentators do. While we might have seen the last of Trump, the conditions for the return of someone like him remain. The more the Biden administration pursues the same neoliberal economic policies while strengthening the security state against the “deplorables” the more they will be tempted to turn to a more competent populist. Trump was hated by the elite, “woke” liberals and the corporate media because of his boorish behavior not because of his policies which were average for a Republican president.

Going further, the Obama administration and Democrat’s prepared the ground for Trump not only with their bailout of the banks and kid-soft treatment of Wall Street that engendered massive unrest, (see–the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street), but with their diminishment of the demos through their neoliberal economic policies. As neoliberalism converts every political or social problem into market terms, it converts them to individual problems with market solutions. Think the Obama administration fascination with voucher systems as a response to the collapse of quality public education, or the Affordable Care Act with it’s endless online shopping for the right health-care plan. As this neoliberal political rationality devolves both political problems and solutions from public to private, it further dissipates political or public life: the project of navigating the social becomes entirely one of discerning, affording, and procuring a personal solution to every socially produced problem.

So after all of this why wouldn’t the American people choose the host of The Apprentice to be the president?

The way to eliminate or minimize Trumpism, or fascism, or whatever you want to call it, is to eliminate the conditions–neoliberalism–that gave rise to it in the first place.

The Biden administration could take actions to heal the nation by offering universal policies, like Medicare-for-All, student aid, mortgage and rental assistance during the pandemic, etc., you know, left-wing solutions like FDR offered during the Great Depression. Here’s an idea–“put Americans to work and print money to pay for it“.

But, they won’t.

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Desert Solitaire

Posted on January 23, 2021 by camelotkidd

I had to get away from the pomp and ceremony of the inauguration and take a break in the desert.

Back next week with some things to say about the incoming administration.

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Amnesia

Posted on January 15, 2021 by camelotkidd

I’ve come to realize that Gore Vidal seriously underestimated the amnesia of the American public. Especially New York Times reading, MSNBC watching, liberals, who’ve come to resemble “Moonies” handing out literature at the airport. To them I say–you can’t accuse Trump of treason for 4 years, call for his assassination then act as if the dangerous escalation in poisonous rhetoric and protest are all his fault.

Liberals freaking out about the Instagram Insurrection seem to have completely forgotten the protests and #Resistance following Trump’s surprise election in 2016, where they believed the claims of voter fraud and of the election being stolen from Hillary Clinton. Trump’s inauguration was met with massive protests that saw police arrest 234 people. Immediate vows of insurrection and protest were issued by not only liberals and members in good standing in the DNC, but, more ominously, by the corporate media and the deep state, who were alarmed at Trump’s vow to end America’s forever wars and reset relations with Russia.

Trump was demonized because he was correctly perceived by the deep state and corporate media as a threat to the Establishment. Trump’s election surprised the Establishment. They thought that control over the corporate media guaranteed their power and were astonished to realize that enough American voters saw through their lies and propaganda to elect a non-establishment figure. Indeed, the corporate media and DNC engaged in probably the most hysterical candidate bashing propaganda operation in history only to find out that the “deplorables” did not vote as they were told to, they voted for “Trump The New Hitler” instead.

Personally, I think the result was a vote against Hillary Clinton and moreover a giant fuck-you to the Establishment from the American people as much as support for Trump.

Russia-gate was the immediate response to the challenge Trump represented. Indeed, the reasons for Russia-gate were spelled out from the beginning. A journalistic insider’s account of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Shattered, revealed that “in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss.” Her top advisers were summoned the following day, according to the book, “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

Going further, it was a coup, initiated by British intelligence agencies and carried forward by the CIA and FBI. It is extraordinary that anyone could have fallen for the Establishment’s story that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election from Hillary, but so many did. The Establishment could not permit the realization that the American Establishment had been rejected by the American people in the 2016 election. Using the CIA and FBI the Establishment went to work on Trump. His entire four years was used in fighting orchestrated Russia-gate investigations and an orchestrated impeachment.

As Trump leaves office, voluminous public records – including investigative reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Congress and the Justice Department’s inspector general – have established that Trump and his associates were targeted with a baseless Russian collusion allegation. The fraudulent claim originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign, was fueled by a torrent of false or deceptive intelligence leaks, and was improperly investigated by the FBI, potentially to the point of being criminal.

A just released memo confirms what was already known. ““In late July 2016, US intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against US Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the DNC.”

The allegation that the Russian hacked the DNC servers has also likewise been shredded. Beginning back in January 2017,- Person X received information from Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, that one of his sources had received information from an FBI report stating that Seth Rich had leaked emails to Wikileaks, requested payment and made copies of the emails as a precautionary measure.

Public comments from former intelligence officials, with their false insinuations about a Trump-Russia connection, followed a longstanding pattern. In the early months of Trump’s presidency, anonymously sourced stories fueled collusion innuendo, helped oust Michael Flynn on false pretenses, and built momentum for Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. Key among them was a February 2017 report in the New York Times asserting that U.S. investigators had obtained “phone records and intercepted calls” showing that members of Trump’s campaign and other associates “had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.” Four months later, James Comey testified that the story was “not true.”

More evidence of Russia-gate nefariousness can found: here, here, here, and here.

In the aftermath of the Capital protests, it’s hard not to notice the double standard the political class and corporate media have imposed. Not only was the raid declared to be a coup regardless of the fact that at no point was there any risk of the United States government being toppled, but there was also the cry for immediate censorship of social media here in the US. This call for censorship of social media is, of course, completely different from the reaction to other countries targeted by the US, like Iran, Venezuela, Ukraine, etc., where the governments are castigated for censoring social media. Thus the Capital protests were a coup but the events in the countries the US is attempting to overthrow using a “color revolution” are just heroic citizens expressing their democratic yearnings. The dirty little secret, kept on the down-low by the corporate media, is that America is the world leader in coups. America overthrows governments regularly, including democratic ones.

Because the Capitol riot story feeds into partisan narratives and manufactures consent for authoritarian domestic terrorism laws, while overthrowing governments the US doesn’t approve of is bi-partisan foreign policy, this double standard passes unnoticed. In fact, it’s a good example of the propaganda function of the corporate media, where they keep the America people focused on demonizing the unworthy victims while lionizing the worthy ones.

It’s no wonder that the corporate media has lost credibility over many years from the prevalent lies they have told concerning false pretexts for foreign wars, and, in the past four years, regarding the whole baseless Russia-gate scandal embroiling Trump. Nevertheless, America at large seems to have become mired in conspiratorial thinking that is bordering on mass delusional, preventing normal cognitive function and rationale dialogue based on any consensus around objective reality.

I’ve worked for the last 5 years debunking Russia-gate and at this point it’s tiresome. Along the way I’ve come to realize that liberals with their Trump Derangement Syndrome, have so much invested in the smear precisely because they can’t come out and admit that all the policies and candidates that they cheered on led directly to the election of Donald Trump. It’s much better for their psychological well being to blame it all on a demonizable villain like Vladimir Putin. As an added bonus, Russia-gate with its incessant valorizing of security and intelligence officials and general atmosphere of emergency, turbo-charged liberal support for a new Cold War with Russia. Now, it is not just the right-wing which is a gullible audience for such psychological warfare regarding Russia but credulous Western liberals.

If all this sounds like a defense of Trump, it’s not. I’m not a Republican or a Democrat but a critical thinker who has become alarmed at the hateful rhetoric on both sides. None of us who remain silent and impassive in the face of evil, racism, extreme materialism, meanness, intolerance, cruelty, injustice, propaganda and ignorance get a free pass.

Unfortunately the Capital protests and aftermath have made clear that many Americans have lost faith in our political and economic systems and are at loggerheads, where one side believes the election was stolen while the other insists what happened Wednesday was a coup.

And, as long as Congress and the rest of the Establishment continue to ignore ordinary Americans’ interests and serve only their own, the anger and the desperation in the land will explode, rendering Wednesday’s events merely a dress rehearsal for what may well turn into a full-blown insurrection.

Update: Too funny.

Aaron Maté@aaronjmate· Overlooked irony: this time Trump is being rightly impeached for inciting a violent far-right mob. Last time Trump was impeached for, in part, briefly pausing weapons that were aiding far-right Ukrainian forces in a violent proxy war incited by the US.

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