Year of the Comet

Posted on August 28, 2020 by camelotkidd

2020 has been a real bitch, and we still have an election that promises to be the most divisive in history to look forward to.

Speaking of which, in my travels I saw exactly one Biden sign but hundreds of Trump flags and hand scrawled signs of support.

Most of my liberal friends remain baffled by this phenomenon but I have been giving it a lot of thought since Trump’s surprise victory in 2016.

I’ve come to believe that the reason for Trump’s support out in “flyover country” is that these are the citizens who have felt the brunt of our 40 year abandonment of any shared commitment in America. These Trump supporters think they are getting screwed-over by an unfair system. They think “free trade” only benefits the rich, they think the government is unresponsive to their needs, they think the system is rigged, and they’re really, really mad. Trump won due to Clinton’s support for free trade and immigration policies that cost jobs and imposed unwelcome demographic changes on the working people of these places. Critical battleground states tilted in Trump’s favor because Democratic policies had decimated their communities and eviscerated their standard of living.

Going further, I believe that the grievances expressed by these “flyover” Americans are the same ones discussed in Thomas Frank’s new book–The People, No. Frank traces the history of mass democratic movements through the social upheaval of the last century, revealing a force for enlightenment and liberation–the essence of democracy itself. More importantly, Frank details the elite groups–today’s Professional Managerial Class (PMC’s)–that have and still oppose populism and denounce it. He also shows how this anti-populism has morphed from being a policy of wealthy conservatives in the 1890’s to the faith of liberal elite PMC’s today.

Of course liberals don’t want to hear this analysis. It’s far easier for them to imagine all Trump supporters as “white nationalists” and “racists”. That these liberals have largely been on the winning side of the great free-trade transformation of this country is conveniently ignored. I’ve got mine, jack. Learn how to code.

There’s a history to our populist moment. Going back to Reagan, wealthy and middle-class Americans were happy to trade tax cuts for a good and decent country. This abandonment provided the justification for eliminating well-paying jobs that didn’t require a college degree and shipping them to China to profit from much lower labor costs, and the refusal to invest in infrastructure while privatizing essential services. Even worse has been the callous disregard shown by wealthy liberal elites to the opioid epidemic and deaths of despair that are destroying families and communities all across the country.

There are numerous explanations but I think it’s largely that we don’t do socialism in America–full stop. Americans are trained from birth to “look out for yourself” and not expect help from others. But the fact is that nobody can actually look out for themselves. Interdependence is simply a fact of life in any complex economy. We all depend on state-created laws, regulations, subsides, and policies. Average Americans used to understand these things as part of their political education, but no longer. One hundred years of increasingly sophisticated propaganda will do that. The media’s success in bringing about subservience to their propaganda, public relations and advertising represents a huge incentive for more of the same to come.

Our two party system of governance also abets our disregard for fellow Americans, specifically where one political party moves dramatically to the right while the other follows along while pretending to provide an alternative. In reality both parties use their supporters as props. White nationalists and Black Lives Matter to the extent global capital deems absolutely necessary. Moreover, it’s apparent that both parties need each other. The increasing lunacy of the GOP that keeps frightened liberal voters satisfied with the meager crumbs of progress promised and unevenly delivered by the Democrats. The Democratic Party’s abandonment of the New Deal and embrace of shallow corporate liberalism keeps white working-class voters flocking to a GOP that only uses and abuses them.

The challenge for us with a deadly virus that’s shut down much of our country, destructive fires smoking out the west and hurricanes punishing the Gulf is that we are going to need to rediscover how to work together as Americans.

Unfortunately, as we head into fall, mass despair and this division into two opposing camps is just waiting for a spark to blow into a conflagration of rage. The result could easily spin out of anyone’s control.

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Time to hit the road. Be back soon.

Posted on August 17, 2020 by camelotkidd
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So much winning

Posted on August 7, 2020 by camelotkidd

I must confess to getting a key point completely wrong.

Last week I claimed that we’ve had an unbroken string of elite failure, but that’s not correct.

Their failure only effects us. For them, it’s so much winning.

Allow me to explain.

The crucial thing to understand is that our elites are predators. They are taught that they have no obligation to other people. Their operating principles are the same basic neoliberal ones that Maggie Thatcher articulated: There is no such thing as society. Greed is good. There is no alternative (TINA). This is the most important thing you can understand about our country today. You can’t count on US elites to care about you at all. If it is in their best financial interest to impoverish you, or make you homeless, or even kill you, they will do so.

This is where neoliberalism leads, It’s what its internal logic demands.

Meanwhile, because our society has become bifurcated between the feral elite and everyone else, there are two outcomes. They win, we lose. Indeed, the salient question is why shouldn’t our country just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?

The vaunted US military is a great example of how it works. Since 9/11 we’ve been at war continuously but have a series of failed or at best inconclusive military campaigns to show for it. Meanwhile we been told repeatedly that we’ve got the best military in the history of the world, certainly the most expensive, and yet we can see with our own eyes that it’s not actually doing a lot of winning. Except, even while the US military has lost our elite, who own the defense corporations that construct the high-tech weapons systems that a modern military depends on, have been reaping a fortune.

So much winning.

You can see something similar by looking at the actions of our elite during the pandemic. For instance, billionaires have seen their collective wealth increase by nearly $700 billion while ordinary Americans face increasing economic insecurity amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The impending evictions may soon kick 28 million people/families out of their homes. At the end of this, US elites will control a larger percentage of the US economy than before. They will be wealthier and more powerful. And if that means tens of millions of Americans are homeless and hungry, then that is a price US elites are willing for you to pay.

They are just not that into you.

And it’s not just the Trump administration though they deserve plenty of blame. Without a huge supporting cast, including Congress, Trump could not have done what he did (and didn’t). If his incompetence had been affecting elites negatively and not making them richer, you can be damn sure the pandemic would have been dealt with forthrightly. It wasn’t because it was making them richer and furthering their plans.

Despite everything else the real outrage should be over the fact that our political and business elite have massively prospered even as they’ve presided over a stunning level of national decline, degradation and loss. An elite that grows richer and more powerful by the day while our government declines to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure.

This should be the headline news every-single-fucking-day.

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Year Zero

Posted on July 31, 2020 by camelotkidd

One of the strangest things about Trump’s election victory is that 2016 became Year Zero. Everything bad with America began at that point and no history is allowed before.

This willful blindness has the considerable advantage to our feral elite, absolving them of all of the horrible policies that made the election of Trump possible. Once that reset is finalized, everything that happened before Year Zero will effectively be off-limits. Everything that happened after that is a damn shame. And no one but Donald Trump are to blame for any of the havoc and tragedy you see all around you. Indeed, political operatives in both parties are busy erasing evidence of their culpability in the crisis that’s overtaken our country.

Nothing to see here.

I’m sure that Trump’s election wasn’t caused by the Bush administration’s lawless invasion of Iraq, and aggressive neoconservative foreign policies of murder, torture and endless war. Or the imposition of a corporate healthcare monstrosity like Obamacare, that was modeled on a right-wing Heritage Foundation plan.

No sir.

Trump’s election certainly wasn’t caused by greedy US corporate executives outsourcing American manufacturing jobs to China. Or the de-industrialization of America, which saw the systematic shutdown of auto, steel and other factories across our country, devastating working-class cities such as Detroit, Milwaukee, and Youngstown, Ohio. All of these places that voted for Trump.

I wonder why?

The bi-partisan deregulation of finance, followed by the largest banking crash since the Great Depression, leading to skyrocketing inequality, had nothing whatsoever to do with Trump’s surprise victory.

No way.

The GOP never utilized a Southern Strategy, and Trump is definitely the first racist president.

It’s true.

The crazy idea that there’s some kind of an American empire is Russian disinformation. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, was the epitome of peace. His administration didn’t overthrow the Libyan government, or overthrow the Ukrainian government, or attempt to overthrow the Syrian government using Al Qaeda terrorists.

We’d never.

Identity politics at the expense of class based politics by our so-called opposition party certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with Trump’s election.

It’s impossible.

The idea of a competent national governance that cares for all Americans has never been questioned. We never had a cadre of neoliberal ideologues claiming that government should be “drowned in a bathtub”. We’ve also never privatized basic services such as education and health, or allowed public facilities and infrastructure to fall into disrepair.

Never would do it.

And, finally, we never had an unbroken record of elite failure after elite failure, after elite failure.

They couldn’t.

Yet suddenly and without warning the Orange-Man-Bad showed up and body snatched the entire virtuous, enlightened and competent American government while we weren’t looking.

The whole shuck and jive is darkly humorous, as well as extremely enlightening about the corporate media’s propaganda role.

What’s not funny is that the election of 2020 is an election of zero’s. A choice between Donald “grab them by the pussy” Trump and Joe “creepy uncle” Biden.

Some fucking choice.

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It’s the empire, stupid!

Posted on July 24, 2020 by camelotkidd

9/11 and the “War on Terror” radically transformed America. Since the end of WWII the US has been the dominant world power but after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon the “gloves came off”. The neocons had been plotting this transformation since the fall of the Soviet Union but liberal intellectuals and the liberal corporate media were maybe worse in their embrace of a lawless and heavily militarized empire. I remember being shocked listening to a liberal academic on NPR calmly speculating that, just hypothetically, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we might need to sacrifice our principles a bit, and torture some people, to “keep America safe.”

It didn’t end with the Bush Administration. For all the campaign blather about Hope and Change, Obama maintained the neocons foreign policy of murder, torture and endless war, while adding indefinite detention. The WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video offers a chilling glimpse into the actions of our lawless empire, where US helicopter pilots casually gun-down civilians, like it was just another day at the office. This revelation of the dark underside of empire is, by the way, the source of liberal anger against Julian Assange, who is smeared as an agent of Russia.

As you may have heard, masked men without badges are jumping out of unmarked vans and grabbing people in Portland. This is what empire brings. It is what Americans have inflicted on others, and it is coming home. As I’ve stated here before: what happens on the periphery of empire always come home. It’s essentially a lesser version of what America taught Latin American nations to do at the School of the Americas. Americans have also spent a lot of time teaching other people how to do this, and in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere where they were “advisors” have engaged in such behavior themselves. When American citizens started to question our system of inequality, it was inevitable that such tactics would be used against them also.

Going further, I’ve come to believe that empire is the real cause of liberal angst in the age of Trump. After all, it’s liberals who’ve been behind all the deep state machinations because they find Trump wholly undependable as manager of U.S. empire. If you will recall from the way-back machine, Trump ran against our worldwide empire and in the Republican debates criticized the invasion of Iraq as a huge mistake while linking this criticism to Obama’s regime-change policies. All of the attacks on Trump have come from this bi-partisan defense of empire, from Russia-gate to Ukraine-gate to the criticism of Trump failing to establish a no-fly zone in Syria, etc. With this perspective, is it any surprise that liberals joined the intelligence agencies to spy on members of the Trump campaign?

Indeed, the most amazing thing about the Trump presidency has been the response by liberals, where they’ve continuously attacked him from the right.

Of course, this behavior has consequences.

Right now our bi-partisan deep state insists that we initiate a new Cold War with both Russia and China. All of this in the teeth of a terrifying pandemic that our vaunted National Security State seems powerless to do much about.

A new Cold War does have the great advantage of diverting attention from our government’s incompetence in coping with the pandemic. It is just possible to get distracted amid the threat of a new Cold War, and their intention is certainly that we forget and don’t blame them for fucking-up the response to a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Unfortunately, this is the behavior of an empire in its twilight, where it thrashes around, desperately engaging in more and more of the destructive actions that led to its decline.

Hold on tight.

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Opaque

Posted on July 16, 2020 by camelotkidd

I’m re-reading Matt Taibbi’s, Hate Inc., and enjoying it even more than the first time. Written as an update to the classic–Manufacturing Consent–it’s a great primer on media malfeasance and how we came to have a con-man as our president. The chapter where he deconstructs Trump’s campaign through the lens of pro-wrestling is priceless.

I do have one minor quibble.

Taibbi is basically writing a mea culpa for his part in feeding the corporate media beast raw meat and he makes plenty of great points about how the news is simply another product they sell us. And he has some great advice about not getting to caught up in the voluminous product in that we can’t do anything about it. But the part about financial products caught my eye. He says we can’t hope to understand any of these financial products like credit default swaps or derivatives because they are too opaque.

My quibble is that Taibbi is relegating this opacity to economics. Instead, it’s clear that the reason these financial products are opaque is political. It’s predicated on the immense power of the financial and banking industry with their legions of lobbyists and riches of campaign donations.

As we’ve witnessed, over the last several decades Wall Street has carried out an epic crime spree due to opacity. As heterodox economist Michael Hudson, repeats endlessly–opacity is the necessary first step to looting.

This state of affairs hasn’t always been thus. From the banking reforms of the New Deal until a bi-partisan push to deregulate finance in the 1990’s, banking was highly regulated and as a result was staid, boring and modestly profitable, while the productive economy boomed.

Now the fiendishly complex field of finance has become a lot more exciting, and immensely more lucrative for Wall Street, while the productive economy has stagnated.

This state of affairs is the ultimate political question– how do we maintain a productive economy rather than an extractive one?

Right now it’s not looking good for the home team. In the face of a new a terrifying pandemic our corporate governance responded with the largest upward transfer of wealth in history, leaving banks and corporations with record-high stocks while killing small businesses and abandoning the public after handing some of them a paltry $1200, all while failing spectacularly to address the threat of the virus itself.

This financial abuse is happening right out in the open, right in front of everyone.

I don’t profess to understand credit default currency swaps anymore than Taibbi but I do know the consequences of an opaque financial system.

Bad-shit happens.

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Cultural Revolution

Posted on July 16, 2020 by camelotkidd

It appears that the Chinese have exported their Cultural Revolution to the US in return for US corporations exporting American manufacturing jobs to China. This Cultural Revolution has been enormously beneficial to our feral elite in dividing and ruling, by using group antagonism to distract from the problems created by globalized markets while blaming individuals for social problems to prevent those problems from becoming political questions. This means that the conversation is always focused on race, gender, sexuality, religion, and other cultural touchstones. These “identity politics” have produced the cancel culture in which individuals face social and political sanction if they refuse to fight the Cultural Revolution, fight for the wrong side, or fight with insufficient fervor.

Mao would be so proud.

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The Last Taboo

Posted on July 10, 2020 by camelotkidd

It will be interesting to see if Ghislaine Maxwell survives her incarceration to give testimony about Jeffery Epstein and his child-sex blackmail ring.

I’ve always thought the story to be fascinating in that it’s a window into how the deep state operates, and the fact that opaque and unaccountable intelligence agencies use child sex slavery to blackmail powerful world leaders and manipulate our society. Indeed, the real story of Epstein and Maxwell is the systematic entrapment and blackmailing of major political and economic figures the world over.

Maxwell, like Epstein, was never the lead player in the sexual blackmail op. However, she does know where the bodies where buried, so to speak. Her father Robert Maxwell was a British media tycoon with close ties and connections to British and Israeli intelligence, who died under mysterious circumstances, and was given a state burial in Israel, where the Prime Minister, Ehud Barak. and no less than six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence attended.

This is by far the most sensational aspect of the Jeffery Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell story. Israeli intelligence agencies and especially Mossad appear to be running pedophile rings that blackmail Western political, business and scientific leaders. Philip Giraldi, a highly-regarded former CIA officer, suggested that Epstein had probably been working for Mossad, operating “honey traps” to obtain blackmail information on all the wealthy and powerful individuals whom he regularly plied with underage girls.

It seems that Ghislaine was not only a madame to Epstein but also to the ruling elite. This would both explain her popularity and the fact that the corporate media treats her with kid gloves.

If you peruse the corporate media for details there’s plenty of salacious gossip but any mention of Israeli intelligence gathering is strictly off-limits. Thanks to internet sleuths much of the story has been speculated on. After it was revealed that Epstein had evaded stricter sentencing in 2008 due to his links to “intelligence,” it was the Mossad ties of Ghislaine Maxwell’s father that have led many to wonder if Epstein’s sexual blackmail operation was sharing incriminating information with the Mossad. Whitney Webb from Mintpress has found many of the stories related to Epstein and Maxwell. Some of them mention the Mossad connection and others note the orgies.

Of course, for Mossad to be running this sort of honey-trap, blackmail operation on American soil the CIA, FBI and other US spy agencies would have to be aware, wouldn’t they?

I’ve come to believe that this all is connected to the US deep state but also global politics involving sex trafficking, drug and arms trade, money laundering, Ponzi schemes, spy networks and blackmailing for Mossad. Sexual blackmail – especially involving little children – can be an extremely efficient way to influence key politicians and even military officials. Epstein’s victims were caught in a web of international spy network that used them as pawns for blackmail operations. The younger the girls were, the more leverage Israel would have over politicians, billionaires and scientists. Thus Epstein and Ghislaine tried to also recruit girls who were well under the age of 16

The decades have certainly softened the effectiveness of many forms of blackmail. I’m not sure that the old adage about a politician ending his career by being caught in bed with either a live boy or dead girl applies in the age of Trump. But pedophilia still ranks as an extremely powerful taboo. Career ending.

And, this brings us to the heart of the matter. Given that intelligence agencies in the U.S. often conduct covert operations for the benefit of oligarchs and large corporations as opposed to national security, the use of child-sex blackmail to control politicians should make us seriously question our representative form of democracy.

The Clinton’s are a good example of this dynamic. Despite the Clinton’s willingness to embrace corrupt dealings during the span of their political careers, their mostly friendly relationship with this network still saw them use the power of sexual blackmail to obtain certain policy decisions that were favorable to their personal and financial interests but not to their political reputation or agendas.

And certainly not favorable to we the people.

Maybe what this case really represents is that any politician who makes it to the national stage is compromised, a puppet being wielded by unseen actors?

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State Media

Posted on July 3, 2020 by camelotkidd

Despite the myth about a vaunted Forth Estate that holds power accountable, the press in the US operates with all of the conformity of a state run media, censoring alternative narratives and ensuring that the neoliberal/neoconservative party line is dominant.

But, of course, that’s not what the elite broadcasters and journalists believe. They believe that what they report is the “truth”. That nobody tells them what to write or say, yet will then report exactly what unnamed Western intelligence operatives tell them, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of embarrassment that Russia and China are evil because they have state media.

These trends of media conformity and propaganda have long been visible but since the election of Trump they’ve gone into overdrive. It’s been clear since Russia-gate that our feral elite had settled on a more aggressive form of social control via nonstop disinformation presented as headline news based on spurious accusations from anonymous sources, none of who were were ever identified, and none of whose claims could ever be verified. During the last 4 years the media has continued this propaganda campaign without pause and without ever acknowledging that its central claims have been exposed as lies.

The way mainstream news outlets consistently refuse to account for a fact so obvious and indisputable as intelligence agencies being known liars should by itself be enough to discredit the entire institution of mass news reporting. I mean, seriously, Mike Pompeo boasted that the CIA lies as a key part of its job, and crickets.

Going further, after the lies used to drive the invasion of Iraq any journalist who relies on the word of an off the record intelligence operative should be considered a propagandist.

Yet here we are with the latest New York Times bombshell about shadowy Russian intelligence outfits providing bounties to the Taliban to kill US soldiers being treated as established fact throughout the entire political/media class and down through the entire population of propagandized rank-and-file citizenry.

These flimsy, poorly-sourced allegations are being hammered into mainstream liberal consciousness on a daily basis now in the exact same way that Russia-gate was, and just like with Russia-gate the narrative they are being used to shape helps advance military expansionism and new cold war escalations which just so happen to fit perfectly into pre-existing geostrategic agendas of empire. The reason for this is because the propagandists who manufacture consent for imperialist agendas understand that truth and facts matter far less than does mindless repetition and emotion.

Even with the Covid-19 pandemic and unrest in American cities over police violence our reality remains forever war with a state media to make it so.

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It Works

Posted on June 26, 2020 by camelotkidd

I was ready to write another post equivocating the two political parties when I saw that John Bolton had released his memoirs, where he claims Trump is a danger to the republic. Well that did it. I’ve been on the fence but if John Bolton says that Trump is a danger to the republic then it’s time I joined the resistance.

Hah, hah, hah!

In his memoir Bolton also informs us that President Trump is erratic. Who knew? Bolton, the former National Security Advisor who once threatened the children of a UN official, joins former president George W. Bush as the latest hero of the resistance. Maybe Ellen will have him on her show for a hug?

Anyway, lately I’ve been getting a lot of push-back about being a Trump supporter. Let me reiterate something longtime readers know. I despise Trump and the Republicans just as I despise Biden and the Democrats. What can I say? I’m an equal opportunity hater.

America is a violent empire that rules the world while pretending to be a beacon for peace and democracy. Only people who are willing to keep these psychopathic mechanisms in place are permitted to ascend to the highest political office. While the corporate media focuses on the relatively minor differences between candidates, you can learn a lot more about our political process and what drives it by looking at their similarities.

But that’s not what most Americans believe. They’ve been propagandized to embrace the tribalism that the billionaires that control both political parties use to divide and rule.

You know–Team Red vs Team Blue.

For instance, I’m supposed to mindlessly support Team Blue Team even as they perpetuate their lesser evil shtick. For decades the Democrats have offered solutions that don’t work, and have exhausted the number of times they can tell people, vote for us now and we will deliver for you later. However, for 2020 election they’ve selected Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. Joe-fucking-Biden? His whole record is one of monstrous policies and decisions. If you thought Hillary was bad, you haven’t seen anything.

And this is not a Democratic or Republican issue, it’s quite simply that the billionaires have bought the government, and it no longer works for us. Biden won’t really do anything different, he’ll just have better PR, and the corporate media will signal that everything is now “normal”. This is hardly a surprise. We are currently living in the failed-state that Biden has worked his whole career to create.

But he’s the Team Blue product and that’s what they are selling.

Political messaging is similar to product advertising. Economic theories of rationality posit that consumers are rational but everyday this theory is disproved by advertising designed to make consumers irrational. It’s the same with political messaging and propaganda.

Regarding the vast U.S. media propaganda machine, Chomsky famously said long ago that propaganda was even more crucial in democratic societies. In a totalitarian regime, the government can control the population with force and violence, imprisoning or executing dissidents. But in a democratic society, citizens have the power to vote and change the government. Therefore, it is more necessary in a democratic society to control how the public thinks using advertising and propaganda.

The ad men in politics who are able to capture the imaginations of these lied-to, thwarted people rely upon tropes that were first promulgated in selling used cars. Call it what you like—relativism, postmodernism, deconstruction. The lesson is one and the same: The truth is not out there waiting to be objectively uncovered. The truth is made. Facts are fabricated as seen fit by the powers that be, and then consent for those facts is manufactured, enforced.

Thus we are bombarded by advertising for shitty products, and propaganda for shitty candidates and policies because it works.

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