Shameless

Posted on August 29, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: Mitt Romney, Mittens as I like to call him, represents everything that’s wrong with our modern day financialized economy.

However, Mittens, who recently spoke out against the “socialist agenda” of the Democratic presidential candidates while touting himself as a different kind of Republican, appears shameless about his contributions.

Mitten’s, as you might remember, made his fortune in the Private Equity (PE) business working for Bain Capital.

PE harkens back to the robber baron days, where financiers deploy unregulated dark-pools of money to make fortunes buying, restructuring and selling companies. They typically seek to recoup gains through dividend pay-outs or later sales of the companies to strategic acquirers or back to the public markets through initial public offerings.

What’s become apparent is that private equity is also a neoliberal-economic/political movement whose goal has been to financialize the American economy to the detriment of the vast majority of Americans who work for a living. In the process private equity has transformed corporations from institutions that utilize workers and capital for the purpose of production into extractive institutions designed solely to shift cash to owners and abandon the rest. Like much of our political economy, the ideas behind it were developed in the early 1970s, blueprinted presciently by the Powell Memo. The key takeaway from this transformation is that it encouraged the wholesale looting of our economy for the benefit of PE firms and ultimately Wall Street.

The takeover of Toys “R” Us offers a good example of how PE goes about looting a company that it has acquired. Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust bought the public company in 2005, loading it up with debt. By 2007, though Toys “R” Us was still an immensely popular toy store, the company was spending 97% of its operating profit on debt service. Bain, KKR, and Vornado were technically the ‘owners’ of Toys “R” Us, but they were not liable for any of the debts of the company, or the pensions. Periodically, Toys “R” Us would pay fees to Bain and company, roughly $500 million in total. The toy store stopped innovating, stopped taking care of its stores, and cut costs as aggressively as possible so it could continue the payout. In 2017, the company finally went under, liquidating its stores and firing all of its workers without severance. A lot of people assume Amazon or Walmart killed Toys “R” Us, but it was selling massive numbers of toys until the very end. What destroyed the company was private equity, and public policies that allowed the divorcing of ownership from responsibility.

The ownership of corporations by private equity also creates perverse incentives across industries. For instance, if a certain kind of price gouging strategy works in a pharmaceutical company, a PE firm can replicate the strategy, buying up other companies and engaging in monopoly pricing. We can observe this phenomenon in the Military/Industrial/Complex, where Transdigm embodies this role, buying up aerospace spare parts makers with pricing power and jacking up prices, in effect spreading corrupt contracting arbitrage against the Pentagon much more rapidly than it would have spread otherwise.

Indeed, PE firms appear to be the living, breathing embodiment of Gresham’s law, where “bad money drives out good.”

Yet, this is the value we celebrate in America, where financial looters are feted on TV and elected to national positions of power. It’s hardly an accident that we find ourselves in a bad place.

Every economy is a planned one. Our choice going forward is between an extractive economy managed by private equity and Wall Street looters or a productive economy managed by we-the-people through our elected officials.

Update: Both parties are beholden to finance.

“The DNC Doesn’t Want a Climate Debate for a Reason” [Jacobin]. “While tech money is important, the biggest donors to the DNC in the 2020 cycle are overwhelmingly financial companies, whether hedge funds, private equity, or more traditional investment management. Obviously, most of these firms want to be able to continue to invest in fossil fuels as well as in companies looting the Amazon. Such companies are run by — and depend on the continued existence of — the very rich, our planet’s biggest liability. (Not only do they create immense pollution through private jets and multiple homes, the rich also support such lifestyles through immensely planet-ravaging investments.) The finance class does not want to hear plain talk about solutions to climate change; in many cases, they are getting rich from destroying the planet and do not wish to stop doing this. That’s probably why DNC head Tom Perez called the idea of a climate debate ‘dangerous.’ The DNC also seems to be trying to avoid two likely outcomes of a climate debate: Joe Biden looking bad and Bernie Sanders looking good.”

 

 

 

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Unworthy

Posted on August 22, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

Wow! I leave for a week and everything blows up.

Not only did the stock market crash but Jeffery Epstein committed suicide.

I’m sure that no one saw that coming?

Maybe it was a coincidence for the most valuable prisoner in America to kill himself, or maybe he was murdered to halt an investigation into some of the most wealthy and powerful people on earth. Decide for yourself.

What’s been bizarre is the reaction of the corporate media to any suggestion that there might have been foul play in Epstein’s death. They immediately labeled anyone who doubted the official storyline a conspiracy theorist.

“Jeffrey Epstein: How conspiracy theories spread after financier’s death” reads a BBC headline. “Epstein Suicide Conspiracies Show How Our Information System Is Poisoned” reads one from the New York Times. “Conspiracy Theories Fly Online in Wake of Epstein Death” warns The Wall Street Journal. “Financier Epstein’s Death Disappoints Victims, Launches Conspiracy Theories” reads the headline from US government-funded Voice of America.

What’s infuriating is that this term–conspiracy theorist–is reserved for those of us who question the official narrative as promulgated by the corporate media. It seems that conspiracy theory is how they characterizes any narrative that differs from their reporting of the establishment storyline.

But the Epstein story is so sick and twisted that it defies all attempts at narrative control. For instance, for almost two decades, for some unknown reason, whether to do with ties to foreign intelligence, his billions of dollars, or his social connections, Epstein’s alleged sexual perversion and horrific assaults on young girls was an open secret. For instance, Bill Clinton flew dozens of times on Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the Lolita Express. Yet Epstein remained untouchable.

Historically, all regimes, even so-called democratic/republics have a limited spectrum of authorized opinion, a limited spectrum of what can and cannot be discussed, criticized, or politically represented. And Epstein supposedly was untouchable because he has an intelligence connection to Mossad. Or perhaps Epstein is just the current manifestation of the sordid history of the connection between various factions of the American ruling elites, whose business of sexual exploitation is a fringe benefit of being willing members of the economic and military exploitation of the world.

Yet somehow it’s a conspiracy theory to point any of this out.

Meanwhile, the corporate media has spent the last 3 years flogging the most unbelievable conspiracy theory ever–Russia-gate. Of course, they react with sanctimonious outrage whenever anyone points out that the political and media operatives are engaged in the ultimate conspiracy theory, despite the self-evident fact that that’s exactly what it is: a theory about a band of powerful Russian conspirators conspiring with the highest levels of the US government to elect a Manchurian Candidate as president.

Apparently, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, some conspiracy theories are worthy while others are unworthy. The worthy conspiracy theories appear to advance the cause of the deep-state establishment that maintains America’s far flung empire, while the unworthy ones threaten to shine a light on these nefarious workings.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines conspiracy theory as “the theory that an event or phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties; spec. a belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event”.

In the past, conspiracy theories were popular mostly amongst fringe circles but they are now becoming commonplace in alternative media and social media. I personally believe that the rapid rise in popularity of alternative explanatory theories is an indication of a growing mistrust of the current feral elite with their policies of austerity and endless war.

The essence of the conspiratorial mindset is that powerful shadowy forces are, first, capable of and engaged in the most dastardly skullduggery imaginable, and, second, collaborating with each other across all levels of power. The Epstein case seems to affirm both of these. Going further, the whole sordid affair makes our elites seem like aliens, of a different culture, a different moral code, a different species. How else could they have allowed this to go on for so long?

A little history of the term conspiracy theory would probably be helpful.

Based on an FOIA disclosure, it turns out that it was that the CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of “conspiracy theory” as a term of political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing public opinion. During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been solely responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination, and growing suspicions that top-ranking American leaders had also been involved. So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of “conspiracy theories.”

And it worked too. For awhile.

But when you really think about it, our entire narrative is composed of conspiracy theories. What was 9/11, where supposedly al Qaeda terrorists armed with boxcutters managed to highjack jetliners then fly them through the most heavily guarded airspace on the planet and into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, except an elaborate conspiracy theory?

What I’ve been able to gather from the whole Epstein affair is that you can learn quite a bit about the powerful forces operating behind the scenes in America by noting which conspiracy theories are accepted as worthy and which ones are rejected as unworthy.

 

 

 

 

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Return to Sender

Posted on August 8, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

In the wake the latest mass shootings I wonder if they’re related to our never-ending wars?

Since the El Paso and Dayton attacks there has been the usual cry for gun control or more mental health screenings, along with blame focused on domestic terrorism and racism but an examination of the violence inherent in the maintenance of the American empire is decidedly absent.

Allow me to explain something our leaders and corporate media never will. Crimes committed on the periphery of empire always return to the homeland. Always.

When you think about it, the only reality these two young shooters, one 21 and the other 24, have known is war. Even though they haven’t been on the receiving end of airstrikes, the reality of America’s endless war on terror is the Predator drone equipped with a Hellfire missile controlled by a young video operator not much older than the killers.

Killers.

One of America’s greatest leaders made this connection between imperial and domestic violence. Perhaps, that’s why he was assassinated? At the Riverside Church, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, Martin Luther King portrayed the war in Vietnam as an imperial one, prosecuted at the expense of the poor. Vietnam, he said, was “the symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” and, if left untreated, if the malady continued to fester, “we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”

This speech, which has been dropped from the more conventional memory of King civil-rights activism, was intensely controversial at the time, angering enemies and supporters alike. Many of his close personal aides felt that he shouldn’t have given it.

The reason for the hostility was the same then as it is now. King made the connection between foreign and domestic policies, drawing clear the inexorable ties between domestic policy and unjust aggression abroad.

Until the next mass shooting expect the bi-partisan establishment and their corporate media enablers to focus on domestic terrorism or mental health or violent video games or gun control. What they won’t discuss is the violent US foreign policy that’s inherent in the maintenance of an empire.

Maybe that’s why Americans don’t seem to make the connection between the violence over there and the violence right here in the homeland?

Going further, this lack of interest in international affairs must thus be understood as a crucial weakness of our modern republic. If America has any hope of returning to her roots as a democratic republic Americans will have to start paying attention to foreign policy. Foreign policy is not rocket science. In other countries citizens are well versed on international events and geography. It’s only here in the USA that people are clueless about the rest of the world.

I wonder why?

 

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Scandalous

Posted on August 1, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

Michelle Obama is making the rounds with a curious claim. In a recent interview with CBS This Morning host Gayle King, she contrasted her husband’s presidency with that of his successor by claiming that unlike Trump, the Obama family had had “no scandal”.

Only in the United States of Amnesia could Mrs. Obama get away with a whopper like that.

Ok, maybe her husband didn’t get captured on video talking about the way in which he would grab woman by their private parts but it takes a lot of stones to claim that there were no scandals.

Only in the make believe world that Michelle Obama inhabits was arming and training al Qaeda to overthrow the Syrian government not scandalous.

Following that logic, I’m pretty sure that arming and training Neo-Nazi’s to overthrow the Ukrainian government wasn’t scandalous one little bit. And certainly not overthrowing the Libyan government and turning the country into a living hell where slavery has made a comeback. Don’t even get me started on the overthrow of the left-wing government of Honduras. Please. The US overthrows Central-American countries since forever. And, what of it? It’s not like the migrant caravans heading to the US are from Honduras or anything.

Those were all criminal deeds perpetrated in countries the average American is clueless about. But what about promising hope and change then bailing out Wall Street by foaming the runway with American homeowners? Was that not equally criminally-scandalous?

A lot of my liberal readers protest that I write about Obama and the Democrats when we should focus our ire exclusively on Trump, who is beyond the pale.

My mission is to move past the tribalism that limits our understanding of the economic/political tyranny that confronts us.

Start with the idea that neither party represents you, they just use your outrage over the misdeed of the opposing party to continue the scam. For example, liberals were rightly outraged over the policies of George W. Bush, yet Obama, by the fact that he was perceived as an articulate liberal, was able to mute the outrage that had arisen in the last years of Bush’s term, while continuing the very same policies that harmed his supporters.

I bring this up because in the process of non-stop Russia-gate, liberals managed to embrace a narrative that empowered the worst parts of the foreign policy establishment while inoculating Trump against the very real criminal-scandals that his administration is engaging in right now.

There is a method to the madness.

The narrative managers want us to focus our attention on scandals that are acceptable to the economic and foreign policy establishment. You know–the ones involving sex, drugs, infidelity, or some sort of personal failing on the part of our leaders. In the process we’re missing the really scandalous behavior that our leaders engage in the course of maintaining the American empire. You know–the ones involving murder and torture and plunder.

The only reason these policies don’t seem scandalous is because the narrative managers have normalized them. Going further, without the filter of propaganda promulgated by the corporate media, we’d see the bi-partisan establishment for who they really are.

Monsters.

That’s pretty fucking scandalous.

 

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Makers and Takers

Posted on July 25, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

My state elected a looter as its senator.

Only now, a senator from a different state has introduced an anti-looting bill.

What’s a looter to do?

Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act, which is co-sponsored by Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal, seeks to fundamentally alter the way private equity firms operate. While the likely impetus for Warren’s bill was the spate of private-equity-induced retail bankruptcies, with Toys ‘R’ Us particularly prominent, the bill addresses all the areas targeted by critics of private equity: how it hurts workers and investors and avoids paying its fair share of taxes, thus burdening taxpayers generally.

Critics will say that Warren’s bill has no chance of passing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a wasted effort. With this bill, Warren is taking on the “value creator” myth of private equity and seeking to end or restrict their looting. This bill also has the potential to expose the falsehoods that have kept the private-equity industry from being held to account.

Of course, my senator, who became fabulously wealthy through this sort of “financial innovation”, will oppose such measures, and denounce it as socialism, while the corporate media will dissemble. Such is the nature of the financial world we live in where for the last forty years the American economy has transformed from productive to extractive. In a productive economy workers and managers prosper by making everyones life better. But the other kind of getting rich, “taking” rather than “making,” extractive rather than productive, enriching the few at the expense of the many, taking the free out of free markets, is making a mockery of our republican democracy.

Heterodox economist Michael Hudson says that this momentous transformation of the US economy was brought about by neoliberalism. He says that the US economy became the envy of the world by, “using governments’ deficit spending to build up their infrastructure, raise living standards, create housing and promote progressive taxation that would prevent a rentier class, a landlord and financial class from taking over economic management. In the financial field, they wanted governments to create their own money, to promote their own development, just like the United States does. The role of neoliberalism was the opposite: it was to promote the financial and real estate sector and monopolies to take economic management away from government.”

My senator–Mitt Romney (if you haven’t guessed by now)–became fabulously wealthy during this transition, where the financial firm he worked at–Bain Capital–employed the private equity wealth model of loading former profitable companies up with debt, looting the pension fund to pay themselves enormous fees, then walking away as the company went bankrupt and the employees were kicked to the curb.

Gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi, writing about Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, still has the best description of Mitten’s time at Bain Capital. “And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a “turnaround specialist,” a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.”

But that’s not how we think about the financialization of the American economy thanks to the corporate media. The business press gushed about this economic transformation and scolded anyone who raised doubts as an old-fashioned Marxist, getting in the way of the creative destruction that makes American capitalism the envy of the world. Remember the Money Honey’s, whose job was to fellate (figuratively and literally) Wall Street? They were emblematic of the looting that accelerated during the 1990’s under the watch of Bill Clinton and his financial guru’s Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.

Going forward, it will be instructive to observe how Warren’s anti-looting bill is received and described by the our political class and their corporate media handmaidens. Will Warren’s anti-looting bill open any space to discuss the financial transformation of America that’s been the leading cause of the massive increase in inequality and concomitant political unrest? Indeed, the election of Trump should put to rest any notions that there have been no consequences from such a transformation. The CIA even developed a term for such a phenomenon–blowback.

I’m pretty sure that Warren’s bill will be roundly ignored by the corporate media who will be too busy either denouncing the racism/fascism of Donald Trump and his supporters, or denouncing the identity politics and political correctness of the vast liberal conspiracy.

 

 

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Sacred Cows

Posted on July 18, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

Immigration has been a divisive force throughout American history, simmering just below the surface before exploding into paroxysm’s of violence where riots, lynching and murder are the order of the day.

In a future shaped by extreme climate disruption immigration is guaranteed to a remain a volatile and disruptive issue in American politics. Indeed, this future is already visible here, with Trump’s anti-immigrant message and actions, and in Europe, where immigration is one of the leading contributors to the rise of right-wing populism.

I’ve largely tried to avoid discussing immigration exactly because it’s such a contentious subject, with few easy solutions. That being said, if there’s any hope we better get started articulating the problems and actors who are responsible for the mess we’re in.

For instance, the liberal position that we should have open borders is nuts.

You know who else would love open borders? The rapacious corporations that desire a reserve army of desperate workers who will work for peanuts. Illegal immigrants often wind up in sweat-shop type work like meatpacking plants which are subject to frequent safety violations. Workers who are afraid of deportation don’t complain about labor abuses. It’s reasonable to assume that a high proportion of illegal immigrants are subject to all sorts of other mistreatment: below minimum wage pay, wage theft, hours violations.

Yet the liberal component of the corporate media constantly argue contradictory positions in defense of both wages and immigration without blinking an eye. Low wages are not a bug but a feature of mass immigration. The immigration-led growth model guarantees wage theft by relying implicitly upon a permanent supply shock that guarantees labour oversupply and by importing more exploitative attitudes to class within ethnic groups.

Meanwhile, liberal tech-bros support for enhanced immigration via H1-B visas is simply more labor arbitrage, where they can get highly skilled software engineers from India at a fraction of the cost of an American engineer.

Don’t gloat conservatives. Your support of a belligerent martial foreign policy has directly contributed to the flood refugees from the countries we’ve destroyed through invasions, coups and support and training of right-wing death squads. For example, the torrent of refugees streaming towards the Mexican border are the direct result of US foreign policies of the conservative saint–Ronald Reagan–who supported right-wing juntas in Guatemala and El Salvador, while funding and training the murderous Contras in their assault on the left-wing Sandinista government of Nicaraugua.

Conservative support for ICE and Homeland Security, two militarized and corrupt bureaucracies, makes a mockery of their claim to value small government and freedom. Since 9/11, they’ve cheered on Republican national security policies which have created for all intents and purposes a police state.

Finally, the racism that animates MAGA is an embarrassment. US presidents, particularly in the period of Cold War struggle between American imperialism and the Soviet Union, once sought to posture as leaders of the “Free World,” representing a country which long identified itself as being “a nation of immigrants.” Indeed, America is made up of immigrants who contribute to and enhance our country.

Unless you look like these guys–

Image result for homeland security since 1492 poster

–you are an immigrant too.

Of course, liberals fully support militarized foreign policy and draconian immigration rules too, as long as it was carried out by their progressive champions–Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton. Their approval and support for the right-wing coup in Hondurous in 2009 directly contributed to the wave of desperate refugees streaming toward our southern border. And, of course, they were all in for the murderous policies of regime change in Libya, Syria and Ukraine, carried out under the auspices of the Nobel-Peace-Prize-President, which have sent millions of desperate refugees to Europe, driving the rise of nationalistic, fascist political parties.

Who’d have thunk it? Liberals and conservatives both responsible for disastrous American policies?

So, I have to ask, in this contentious environment where both political parties are married to extreme proposals, is it possible to craft a sensible and humane immigration policy?

A good place to start, in my opinion, would be to end the disastrous neoconservative foreign and neoliberal economic policies so beloved by our bi-partisan elite.

For example, imagine the influx of desperate immigrants from Venezuela if the neocons had succeeded in overthrowing the Maduro administration? Or the flood of refugees that would overrun Europe if the neocons strong-arm Trump into attacking Iran?

Likewise, it will be impossible to get American workers to welcome immigrants as long as our neoliberal mandarins insist on offshoring American manufacturing jobs.

Meanwhile, the rampant brutality witnessed at the ICE facilities on the border is hardly an accident. I believe that neoliberal economic policies have aided and abetted racism and xenophobia  by offering the former blue-collar industrial workers prison guard positions instead. What we’re seeing at the border is a continuation of this prison guard culture that was responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

It would be great if we could direct the hatred of immigrants on to the elites that have crafted these policies that are so disastrous for we-the-people, but oh-so incredibly effective at dividing and ruling.

I can dream.

 

 

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It’s all projection

Posted on July 11, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

Let’s review what Russia-gate was all about.

And no, it wasn’t about Russia interfering in our precious democracy.

It was in response to Russian actions in the Middle-East and in the Ukraine that thwarted US plans for domination. Indeed, Russia remains the single biggest resistance nation to US hegemony. The US markets itself as an upholder of rules-based liberal democratic values, even though it consistently flouts international law, wages imperialist wars of aggression, imprisons journalists, crushes dissent and uses propaganda just as much as any totalitarian regime. The only difference is that it does so in a way that enables its supporters to ignore what’s actually happening.

Russia-gate is simply projection. Depicting the Russians as the nexus of evil allows liberals to pretend that the US maintains and upholds the rule-based liberal order. Let’s face it, after decrying Bush’s foreign policies for 8 years, liberals turned around and acquiesced to Obama’s foreign policies of empire which were largely indistinguishable. It was drone strikes instead of invasions, and coups rather than occupations, but Obama hit the sweet spot for liberals with his mixed-race, suave, sophisticated style and all the right credentials–Columbia University, Harvard Law School, and constitutional law professor. That conservatives believed that Obama was a Kenyon, Muslim, Socialist only added to the irony.

And, while the quest for supremacy is bi-partisan, since Obama Democrats have become the more warlike political party. And, of course, Trump’s election sent this bellicosity into orbit.

To make sense of this it’s important to understand some history. What we’ve seen since the fall of the Soviet Union is a long series of proxy wars, where the US uses it’s terrorist proxies to undermine and overthrow undesirable regimes. Russia has watched all of this and learned some hard lessons about the US’s concern for human rights and democracy. Since coming to power, Vladimir Putin has reoriented Russian foreign policy back to its traditional role of deterrence. Russia has been reluctant to engage but decisive when it does. Moscow didn’t want to see Syria overrun by Sunni terrorists–the US’s favorite proxy–so they intervened in 2015 to ensure that Bashar Assad remained in power. Syria is Russia’s one single stronghold in the Middle East, and deemed indispensable.

The Saker, a White Russian military and political analyst says that the neocon plan was to “overthrow Assad and replace him with their Sunni terrorist proxies–al Qaeda, al Nusra, ISIS, etc.” 

Doing this would achieve the following goals:

  1. Bring down a strong secular Arab state along with its political structure, armed forces, and security services.
  2. Create total chaos and horror in Syria justifying the creation of a “security zone” by Israel not only in the Golan but further north.
  3. Trigger a civil war in Lebanon by unleashing the Takfiri crazies against Hezbollah.
  4. Let the Takfiris and Hezbollah bleed each other to death, then create a “security zone,” but this time in Lebanon.
  5. Prevent the creation of a Shia axis Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon.
  6. Break up Syria along ethnic and religious lines.
  7. Create a Kurdistan which could then be used against Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
  8. Make it possible for Israel to become the uncontested power broker in the Middle-East and force the KSA, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and all others to have to go to Israel for any gas or oil pipeline project.
  9. Gradually isolate, threaten, subvert, and eventually attack Iran with a broad regional coalition of forces.
  10. Eliminate all centers of Shia power in the Middle-East.

Now this entire plan has collapsed due to the very high effectiveness of an informal but yet formidable alliance between Russia, Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.

To say the US national security state was unhappy would be an understatement. Not only that but they’ve reacted with horror to Trump’s surprise election victory and concomitant  talk of easing tensions with Russia.

Does Russia-gate make more sense now?

And, this brings us to the historical projection I alluded to earlier. The Cold War has been described in glowing terms as the US containment of the USSR leading to a glorious triumph of liberal values, but the recent history of US foreign policies would seem to belie this account. I’ve said this before but the evidence grows by the day that it was the Soviets who were deterring us.

Like Russia-gate, it’s more projection to avoid having to face some unpleasant truths about the warlike nature of our bi-partisan foreign policy.

The reason I keep pointing out all the flaws and disinformation in Russia-gate is that this time the national security state’s propaganda campaign was so audacious and clumsy–where the U.S.’s own signature wrongdoings were displaced onto its chief rival, while simultaneously driving liberals into a war frenzy–that it became visible. For any of us paying attention, Russia-gate is like the scene in the Wizard of Oz, where Toto pulls back the curtain and exposes the wizard as the old crank he’s always been.

Update: More evidence that Russia-gate is all projection.

“Bottom line: Russiagate is going up in smoke.  The claim that Russian military intelligence fed thousands of emails to WikiLeaks doesn’t stand up to scrutiny while Mueller is not only unable to a prove a connection between the Internet Research Agency and the Kremlin but is barred from even discussing it, according to Friedrich’s ruling, without risking a charge of contempt.  After 22 months of investigating the ins and outs of Russian interference, Mueller seems to have finally come up dry.”

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Independence Day

Posted on July 3, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

As we head into Independence Day, I think it’s time for another revolution.

Not from England, silly, but from the feral elite who might as well be living in another country for all the ways in which their interests have diverged.

Our corporate media, which slavishly promotes the interests of the feral elite, will never state this obvious truth but it’s unmistakable.

Even our current villain de-jour, Vladimir Putin, has stated so in an unnoticed interview.

“What is happening in the West? What is the reason for the Trump phenomenon, as you said, in the US? What is happening in Europe as well? The ruling elites have broken away from the people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elites and the overwhelming majority of the people.

…We must never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a better future.”

Of course the wily Putin could be interfering in our precious democracy again but he makes an obvious point.

What’s amazing is that these used to be self-evident truths but we’ve gone so far down the rabbit-hole that now it sounds cray-cray.

It’s worth remembering the declaration that kicked the whole thing into gear.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Pretty radical stuff.

In this day and age we could certainly use more of that.

On that note, here’s a task for all the iconoclasts out there. While we celebrate with friends and fireworks and barbecue, contemplate how we can bring about another revolution by spreading radical notions like the Declaration of Independence.

Rogue journalist, Caitlin Johnstone, has a primer.

“If you want to pour your energy into making real change, and you want to make sure that your energy is as efficient and efficacious as possible, there is an easy target for you to fix your gaze on. Simply put all of your energy into getting dissident ideas into mainstream attention.

Stand in the public square and shove as many revolutionary ideas as far into the public spotlight as possible. Do it even if it means people you used to spend your time opposing start picking them up and using them. Do it with the goal of having your healthy anti-establishment ideas become the norm throughout your society. Do it with the goal of your worldview becoming conventional and boring. Do it with the intention of your activism becoming obsolete. Crave the absence of your own cool revolutionary self-image.

The goal of revolutionary political activism is to make revolutionary ideas so common that they become the new normal.”

Happy Independence Day!

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Perpetual Motion Machine

Posted on June 28, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

Most American assume that the US is involved in multiple Middle-East wars because of oil but it’s actually about the dollar as the worlds reserve currency.

Allow me to explain.

In 1971 President Nixon took the US off the gold exchange standard. The dollar became a fiat currency whose value could float. However, to maintain the dollars value relative to other currencies the US manipulates the value through financial engineering and by ensuring that all commodities, especially oil, are priced in dollars. This scheme helps explain why the US has been able to run up large trade deficits year after year and still maintain the dollar as the worlds reserve currency.

This dynamic also explains why it is that the US maintains a global garrison, engages in constant warfare, and is allies with the autocratic kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi’s role as the leading producer of fossil fuels is not the only reason we turn a blind eye to their horrible human right record as well as their ongoing support of terrorism. The Kingdom also recycles the billions of dollars it earns from the sale of oil back into US Treasuries and Wall Street investments and spends record amounts on US weapon purchases. Essentially, the Saudi’s are one of the key cogs in a perpetual motion machine.

Does this picture make more sense now?

The ongoing efforts to prop up the dollar also helps explain why it is that the US has been on a regime-change tear in the Middle-East since the fall of the Soviet Union. If I were cynical, it might appear that the financial engineers that control our country immediately started taking out the uncooperative countries throughout the Middle-East and the so-called policy blunders the US made in Iraq and Libya were anything but.

As The Guardian reported near the beginning of the Iraq War, “In October 2000, Iraq insisted on dumping the U.S. dollar—the currency of the enemy—for the more multilateral euro.”

Can’t have that, now can we.

Then, there’s Libya. Soon after Libya began moving toward an African gold-based currency we destroyed it as well, with the help of NATO. Author Ellen Brown pointed this out at the time of the bombing.”Gadhafi initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar.”

John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, also has said that the true reason for the attack on Libya was Gadhafi’s move away from the dollar and the euro.

The financial engineering that drives America imperialism should also provide some insight into what the current kerfuffle with Iran is really about. For example, Iran is determined to sell its prodigious amounts of oil in Euro’s or Yuan’s instead of dollars.

The importance of this cannot be understated. Mohamed Bin Salman, as the absolute ruler of Saudi Arabia, is playing a central role in escalating the confrontation between the US, backed by Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE on one side, and Iran and its allies on the other. President Trump is giving full support to Saudi Arabia and accusing Iran of acts of sabotage against shipping in the Gulf, but he will have difficulty in dispelling international suspicions that the whole affair is about maintaining the dollar as the worlds reserve currency.

This dollar recycling system is another reason why, even as the US produces record amounts of domestic oil and gas, the US military maintains numerous bases and is ready to intervene in the Middle-East at a moments notice. An interruption of oil will not only cause industrial disruptions, it will make untenable the financial system on which US fiscal and monetary policy is dependent upon.

Here in the US the damage wrought by decades of financial engineering are becoming harder to ignore. The destruction of America’s once vibrant military and commercial industrial capacity in many sectors has become the single biggest unacknowledged threat to our national security. Because of public policies focused on finance instead of production, the United States increasingly cannot produce or maintain vital systems upon which our economy, our military, and our allies rely.

Maintaining the dollar as the worlds reserve currency has also come at a steep cost for the American people since it allows policy makers to neglect domestic manufacturing and ignore the consequent steady erosion of wages for hourly workers. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this dynamic is responsible for the massive inequality we’ve witnessed in recent years.

I’m also cynical enough to believe that the financial engineering that’s a key component of US foreign policy is the reason why the banks were saved rather than the American people in the wake of the Wall Street Crash and why none of the architects spent a day in jail.

Still, nothing goes on forever not even the US perpetual motion machine. Perversely, US foreign policy elite are hastening the dollars demise as the world reserve currency through their aggressive financial warfare against Iran, Russia and China.

Naturally, Trump’s ham-fisted approach has set in motion a much needed global rebalancing. The potential use of the US dollar as a financial weapon of mass-destruction has been evident for some time now for Russians, Chinese and Iranians. For this reason, they have been exchanging their dollars for other currencies and stockpiling gold for years.

And, now the US, as a declining empire, is lashing out, employing every weapon available to try and arrest its diminishing status as the world’s sole superpower.

 

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Unlikely Savior

Posted on June 20, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

Trump came into office critical of the bi-partisan foreign policy establishment while promising to end America’s endless wars.

Since then he’s been under relentless pressure, like Obama before him, to follow the “Washington Playbook.” Whether, North Korea or Syria or Venezuela, Trump’s coterie of neocons that includes Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton, have been clamoring for war, war, war.

And now it’s Iran, where the neocons are joined with Saudi Arabia and Israel in a maximum push for another Middle-East conflagration.

However, there appears to be an unlikely savior in Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, who’s emerged as a leading media voice against American intervention. Since Trump’s election, Carlson has been a rare, outspoken non-interventionist voice on prime time network news, aggressively questioning US military presence and past regime change actions in places like Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, as well as Washington’s long-time weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. For that he’s faced a barrage of flak for hosting foreign policy skeptics like Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, Rand Paul, and others.

And now, a surprising figure is paying attention. The Daily Beast headline claims that  “Tucker Carlson Is Privately Advising Trump On Iran”. The report says “there’s been another, far different voice in the president’s ear: that of Fox News host Tucker Carlson.”

Apparently the president is relying on Carlson as a dissenting voice in the ongoing dispute with Iran. A source familiar with the conversations told The Daily Beast that, in recent weeks, the Fox News host has privately advised Trump against taking military action against Iran. And a senior administration official said that during the president’s recent conversations with the Fox primetime host, Carlson has bashed the more “hawkish members” of his administration.

The popular Fox host has publicly pushed back against the march to war against Iran in recent weeks, saying an escalation and war scenario would likely not be “in anyone’s interest,” while also being a persistent critic of Bolton for his well-known bellicosity towards Iran.

Bashing the neocons is nothing new for Carlson who wrote a book explaining why Trump won the Republican primary by going against them.

“It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. “We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising. “We have destabilized the Middle East.”

Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts declared that the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and carried out.

Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq war was a mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true.

Rival Republicans denounced Trump as an apostate. Voters considered him brave.

Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.

Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that.”

With Trump, who appears to have the attention span of a 3 year old distracted by bright shiny objects, it’s hard to tell if heed Carlson’s advice or be pressured into another disastrous war by the neocons. He did, after all, appoint them into his administration.

Let’s hope he listens to Carlson.

Update: This is getting interesting.

Yesterday evening Tucker Carlson, a FOX News host with a direct line to the White House, had two strong anti-war segments on his show (vid). In the second segment Carlson talks with retired army Colonel Douglas McGregor. Both argue for pulling back on sanctions. This was likely a preplanned exchange (at 9:56 min) designed to give Trump cover for his decision:

Carlson: Is there some good reason to maintain this level of sanctions against Iran? Are we getting something out of that?McGregor: Well, I think the idea was to destroy the Iranian economy to bring the nation to its knees. That is really not what we should be trying to do at this point. I think the president senses that there is now an opportunity for diplomacy, for a new approach to Iran that could deescalate this set of conditions and produce a positive outcome.

Look, this will ruin our economy if we engage Iran in a war. Iran will have instantly have support from around the world. They will be the victim of this “limited strike” that is being discussed. The limited strike idea is sheer insanity. It will provoke a war. Everyone, China, Russia, India, many European states will come to the aid of Iran. We will end up with a larger coalition of the willing against us, than we have seen in decades.

I think the president has figured this out. He’s got good instincts. But he needs to get rid of the warmongers. He needs to throw these geniuses and their limited strikes out of the Oval Office. The last thing the America First agenda needs is a stupid pointless unnecessary war with Iran and he knows that and he needs to act.

[Tucker Carlson agrees]

 

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