Long, hot summer

Posted on May 8, 2020 by camelotkidd

 

Conventional wisdom has it that an armed revolt would stand no chance against the US military with its tanks and jet fighters. But is that true?

Civil wars, for starters, are not like conventional conflicts. They are messy affairs with conflicting and disparate groups of combatants. There are multiple avenues of loyalty and power.

There’s also that inconvenient fact that the US military has not won any of the counter-insurgency wars that it has waged since Vietnam. Just look at Afghanistan, where a rag-tag group of Islamic insurgents has fought the vaunted US military to a draw.

Which brings up another important point. An insurgency doesn’t have to win but to simply not lose.

Meanwhile, in the wake of our response to the coronavirus and stay at home orders, the conditions for an armed conflict seems to be gestating. Unfortunately, all roads lead to highly problematic social outcomes as the majority of citizens see government dysfunction and worse indifference to their plight. Neighbors and their families have lost jobs and benefits, while sinking further into debt. Food shortages and hunger have made a startling comeback in the wake of the current pandemic.

What kind of country tells its citizens to make a choice between risking their lives or risking hunger for their families?

It’s like we’re led by fools who can’t see that everyone has a breaking point. Desperate people do desperate things, especially when they’re heavily armed.

And, now with the protests against the lockdown we’re getting a taste of what’s to come.

“Multiple armed gunmen storm Michigan’s State House, State police are protecting @GovWhitmer and blocking the gunmen from gaining access to the house floor.”

But nothing to worry about. Our tech overlords have got this handled.

In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

I think maybe we’re past that point and I’m not sure our putative leaders have gamed this out. Having 30 % unemployment and citizens turfed out of their homes and apartments for missing payments, with hungry children is not a great scenario for anyone, even the wealthy elite decamped to their summer homes.

The Hamptons is not a defensible position.

Not to be all negative-Nancy but I’ve come to believe that the default setting will be to some sort of dystopian, cyber-punk outcome where regional and local oligarchs fill the power vacuum left at the Federal level and remain indifferent to the suffering. This outcome is consistent with declining life expectancy never having become a political issue, along with deaths of despair and the opioid epidemic.

Benign or malign neglect, it comes to the same thing.

If violence erupts I think you will quickly see elites barricading themselves into their fortresses, to be protected by unmanned drones and private military contractors. Guard labor would be employed as enforcers and protectors for the rich. In due course these local oligarchs then would develop militias and death squads. A quick glance at history shows this dynamic happens again, and again, and again. It’s guaranteed.

Libertarians, who firmly believe that government is the only source of despotism, would be in for a rude surprise.

In the meantime it’s going to be interesting. What happens when there’s another outbreak? I remain doubtful that a second, government-ordered, lockdown would be accepted by the public. It may be rejected – especially in the U.S., where being ‘anti-lockdown’, and perceiving the pandemic more as a sinister ‘globalist’ plot against American ‘Rights’, is fast becoming a mainstream political movement.

What happens when some states just open up while others try to reopen responsibly? Will those “responsible” states begin limiting access to those from states which have chosen to simply let people die. Will this will mean using State police or calling up the National Guard? Going further, where will the loyalties of the police and National Guard lie?

Just asking.

The problem with insurrections is that all kinds of bad shit happens. Those who are left hopeless, jobless, and without assets could easily turn against those who are better off – and should these people become desperate and angry, our society could begin to disintegrate.

Right now our feral elite are desperate to go back to the hyper-globalized, financialized political/economy that provides their wealth and power but I’m not sure that’s possible. As a famous statesman once said–“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

It looks to be a long, hot summer.

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Looting Opportunity

Posted on May 1, 2020 by camelotkidd

 

We don’t do competent governance anymore. Everything is simply a looting opportunity.

There are clusters of competence, of course, but they are overwhelmed by incompetence, corruption and callous disregard for anyone who isn’t wealthy or powerful. The elites have become feral, out of touch with actually producing anything of value and only capable of playing political games. They get money by manipulating politics, not by genuine production. Pump up the stock market, let the workers starve and run out of rent money, shovel money to the rich, so they can swoop in to buy up distressed assets.

Why is it okay for the Fed to create $1.5 trillion to buy stocks to prevent rich people from losing, when it’s not okay to print $1 trillion to pay for free Medicare for the entire population? Remember in the debates during the spring when Biden and Klobuchar kept saying, “Medicare-for-All will cost $1 trillion over 10 years.” But suddenly the Fed can create $1.5 trillion in one week just to buy stocks.

It’s perverse Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), where only the rich should be allowed to print money for themselves, but the government should not be allowed to print money for any public purpose, any social purpose — not for medicine, not for schools, not for personal budgets, not for full employment — but only to give to the 1 percent.

The one-time $1200 payment is derisory. Meanwhile, Republcians and Democrats shovel trillions to malefactors of great wealth, unanimously, without a single dissenting vote. Virtually all the relief money has flowed to the top, not the bottom. Landlords and tenants are in crisis. Unemployment is going over 30% and in many places higher. A vast swathe of American small business will be destroyed, and is unlikely to recover in a generation. Meanwhile, corporations, like Boeing, which borrowed money to do stock buy backs, or to give money to their private equity purchasers are bailed-out, but many small businesses will go under.

If you had consciously tried to engineer a massive public health disaster, you couldn’t hope to match the ways in which the whole American system has been calibrated to transform this crisis into a catastrophe. Decades of racist, anti-worker, and plutocratic government policy has created the ideal conditions for a pandemic to turn the United States into a failed state.

What happened? Well, simply put, the rich grabbed hold of political power, took over the government and started to unlevel the playing field. Wherever they can exercise their power they do. They were aided massively by neoliberal ideology, with its emphasis on the sacrosanctness of the market. The result is that over the last 40 years, a large majority of American workers (us) have seen their real incomes stagnate or decline.

It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflicts a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. What we’re finding out is that government programs in the United States are not designed to solve problems. Rather, they are designed to pretend to solve a given problem so that this problem doesn’t require an amount of spending that would necessitate financial sacrifice on the part of the wealthy.

It would be easy if we had one party that was decent but we have a tag team of evil, opportunistic sociopaths, who would sell out their own grandmother for a campaign donation. We have bad cop, worse cop, where one party supports a brutal, unrestrained version of neoliberalism, and another party supports a marginally less brutal, slightly mitigated version of neoliberalism but with “identity politics” and “safe-spaces”.

Want sprinkles with that scoop of dog-shit?

Presently we have Senate Majority leader and Republican, Mitch McConnell telling state pension funds to drop dead, while, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is now advising Joe Biden’s presidential campaign on economic policy, including its plans to revive the U.S. economy after the coronavirus pandemic. Got that? The party that is supposedly less evil is bringing back Larry-freaking-Summers, the man who has been wrong about everything. Here’s how one pundit described Summers tenure. “Over the past three decades, Summers has amassed a policy record of almost unrivaled social ruin.”

Lately it feels as if I could write a variation of this post every week, but I’m not sure how long this continues. What can’t go on forever doesn’t. History demonstrates that political institutions and the behavior of ruling elites largely determine the economic success or failure of countries and that momentous political changes take place when a nations elite and the major institutions they control lose public trust.

We’ll talk about what comes after next week.

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The Gray Lady

Posted on April 24, 2020 by camelotkidd

 

Of all the topics I discuss probably the most confusing is propaganda.

This week I’m going to focus on the New York Times, since it’s the premier-elite newspaper that all other media take their cues from. Going further, the Times, sets the tone insofar as class is concerned. You know, “class”, the 5-letter word that we’re not supposed to use here in America, where everyone is supposedly “middle-class”.

To help us we’ll use as a guide Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s, Manufacturing Consent, with their propaganda model. Their 5 propaganda filters for the corporate media are: ownership; advertising; the reliance on government and business experts; flak as a means of disciplining the media; and anti-communism.

The Times, along with the Washington Post, is an essential cog in the billionaire-owned corporate media that controls the dominant narrative. Indeed, many of our feral elite get both their news and opinions from Times, which largely exists to serve and defend the owners of capital and provide a facade of liberal enlightenment values. In other words, if you really want to understand our all-American propaganda system, understanding the Times is crucial.

It will be fun.

Let’s start with some basics skills of critical reading. What are you reading for? News? Information? Research? Or simply enjoyment? Personally I like to read the Times as background research to help understand the values and preferences of the feral elite who rule us.

Not all of them. If you want to understand elite Republicans the Wall Street Journal is the place.

The Gray Lady, on the other hand, is the standard bearer for the modern day Democratic party. Not the one popularized by FDR and his New Deal, but the neoliberal Democrats who voted enthusiastically for Barak Obama, and the Clinton’s. Crucially, the Times is the loadstar for the professional/managerial/class–also known as liberals. A simple examination of the ads located within the pages reveals a class bias that’s driven by the first 2 filters of the propaganda model–ownership and advertising. After all, the readership of the Times are wealthy enough to buy the products and frequent the businesses that advertise within its pages.

As you read the Times, it’s important to use the table of contents on the 2nd page to examine the stories that the Times is featuring. This way you can divide them into categories. While the Times is a propaganda organ there are subtle differences. Many articles are not propaganda, are well written, and you can safely read every word as gospel. Others, especially the ones that concern economics, foreign policy and politics, are ones that you have to approach with extreme caution and read with a jaundiced eye.

Articles in the Times concerning politics, foreign policy and economics bring the 3rd, 4th and 5th propaganda filters into play. The reliance on government and business experts means that the range of opinion on politics and policies ranges from neoliberalism to neoconservatism. With flak, the Times, is constantly disciplined into presenting a very conservative viewpoint as their list of opinion columnists attests. Though they present themselves as “liberal” they feel the need to maintain a house conservative in Bret Stephens, even as the rest of the crew–David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Ross Dougherty, Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, etc–are hardly wild-eyed socialists. And, even though communism has been defunct for 30 years, the anti-communism filter can be seen hard at work in the Time’s coverage of the Democratic primaries with it’s clear bias towards Joe Biden, coupled with its extreme hostility towards Bernie Sanders.

Moreover, the Times is a reliable mouthpiece for the US empire. It hasn’t hurt that many of the Times top writers and columnist over the years have been US intelligence agents working to advance “Public Diplomacy”, through covert methods like operation Mockingbird. Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoconservatism, the prevailing orthodoxy in the US-centralized power alliance has been to preserve the unipolar world order at any cost. All US foreign policy has been a direct or indirect result of this agenda ever since. The Times is an enthusiastic cheerleader, parroting the official line, whether bashing Russia non-stop with Russia-gate, or, now, neatly pivoting to bash China as the instigator of the pandemic.

This empire cheerleader role is most apparent in articles that focus on countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and of course, Russia and China, and are almost always propaganda. It is well written propaganda, with a lot of true details and much subtlety so you have to read very carefully. A good tactic with such articles is to read the headline, then contrast that message with the end. A lot of the time they bury the good parts at the end of an article since they know most people only read the first part.

The importance of understanding the role and influence of the Times cannot be overstated. The key takeaway is that when it comes to serious matters such as economics, foreign policy and politics it’s is hardly different from state controlled media and a critical reader should consider the Times to be Pravda on the Hudson.

Caveat emptor.

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The Right Stuff

Posted on April 17, 2020 by camelotkidd

 

As we approach another election featuring two repulsive candidates it’s more important than ever to question what makes an acceptable leader?

It’s become obvious that those who rise to the top are those who are the most talented examples of those who are blind or submissive to power and those who can think most cleverly without thinking critically. Meanwhile, our economic system (neoliberalism) is set up in a way that rewards sociopathy with wealth and power, which means high-functioning sociopaths tend to rise to the top in business, government, and media.

The term for this cadre is a technocrat, but the few who rise to the very top are the ones who can put a happy face on the ruthlessness of our neoliberal economic policies. Think Bill Clinton, or Barak Obama.

In reality, Clinton completed the conservative counter-attack that Ronald Reagan began – much as Barack Obama would do to further the national security state after the horrors of the Iraq invasion. Neither Clinton nor Obama changed the substance of our economic and foreign policies, but they did make them look deceptively attractive by tinkering with social policy.

Were the neoliberal ideology made apparent and articulated by these erstwhile progressives, no one except the billionaires and their lackey’s would vote for such a system. However, neoliberalism is nothing if not adaptable, constantly altering its shape and appearance to deceive us. Powers goal is to keep looking like it has become something new, something innovative. Because the power-structure does not want change, it has to find front-men and women who can personify a transformation that is, in truth, entirely hollow. “Hope and Change”, anyone?

In the upcoming election we will be endlessly told how it will be the most important contest ever with the fate of our country hanging in the balance, but that will be a lie. When you look behind the facade there’s really not much difference between Biden and Trump.

Our liberal gatekeepers have been shrieking about Trump since forever but he’s turned out to be not much different from Obama who turned out to be not that much different than Bush. The angst over Trump, I believe, is largely due to the fact that he isn’t a high-functioning sociopath of the caliber of Obama. He’s so obvious that he gives the game away. Hence the concern from elite political and media talking heads. Also, unlike an Obama or a Clinton, he too clearly illuminates what is really at stake for power–wealth maximisation at any cost–and thereby risks unmasking the deception. Obama, crucially, could keep the sociopathy on the down low, while Trump tweets it from the rooftops.

Going further, the #Resistance to Trump has been largely spearheaded by wealthy members of the professional-managerial-class (PMC), who were Obama’s biggest supporters. I believe that their opposition to Trump is magnified by the secret guilt they feel to be the largest beneficiaries of the neoliberal, globalized economic system that Trump purportedly ran against. These PMC’s have benefitted mightily as American middle-class jobs have been exported to China, resulting in a flood of cheap electronics and consumer products.

They’ve also benefitted from the immigration of Third-World workers to the US. Highly educated woman have achieved great gains in the professional sector (particularly in urban areas), because other women–typically women of color, often immigrants–are fulfilling the traditional care-taking roles within the household, such as childcare, preparing and serving meals and cleaning the house. Thus PMC families have typically been able to profit from the wife working, despite hiring people to perform domestic labor, by paying these workers often non-livable wages for their services.

Trump, as you might recall from the way back-machine, campaigned against all of these things, especially how they affected America’s white-working-class. Of course, he’s turned out to be a typical Republican president with his concern for tax cuts, resource extraction and slashing environmental regulations. Paradoxically, he’s been the right figure head for the populist moment. If neoliberalism has to choose, it typically prefers an insurgent on the right to the left. A right-wing populist figure, like Trump, can usefully serve power too, because he dons the clothes of an insurgent while doing little to actually change the underlying structure.

By the time someone runs for president they’ve more than demonstrated those skills I mentioned at the beginning. That they are blind or submissive to power, can think cleverly without thinking critically, and can reliably deploy their skills where they are directed to do so. Ultimately, these candidates have made Faustian pacts as a condition for being granted access to power.

The election of 2020 will be, once again, a protest election, with the American people desperate for a change of policy trajectory. However, our feral elite have made it clear, once again, that they have no interest in changing a throughly corrupt system that provides them enormous rewards. Indeed, it’s like they’re giving us the finger. Team Red is running a rapist for president. Team Blue is running a rapist for president.

Let them eat cake.

 

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Forest for the Trees

Posted on April 10, 2020 by camelotkidd

 

At Camelotkidd, I’ve settled into a routine of writing critical articles on neoliberalism, neoconservatism, our feral elite, and propaganda, because I realized that these were subjects that not only interested me but were key to making sense of our chaotic world.

Neoliberalism is about where the money is going. Neoconservatism is about where the resources and weapons are going. An examination of America’s feral elite illuminates the actors.

And by studying our feral elite, especially the projects, candidates, think tanks and media outlets they pour their wealth into, I’ve learned that they exert an incredible amount of influence on shaping how we think about all of these things. Moreover, this dynamic has the advantage of nullifying the corporate media propaganda, with its emphasis on narrative, narrative, narrative.

With each of these topics I can simply watch raw data and ignore all the ways in which the corporate media shapes these stories. Nearly everything that makes up a breathless headline is either propaganda or distracting bull-shit, like summer of the shark in the run up to 9/11, and either way you can safely ignore it. Just watch where the money is going, where the resources are going, where the weapons are going and what the feral elite are doing, and ignore all the narrative.

Neat, huh?

This deconstruction allows us some perspective. Ultimately the “real world”, as it is presented to us, rarely reflects anything we might usefully be able to label as objective reality. It is a set of political, economic and social priorities that have been manufactured for us.

The pandemic has disrupted the matrix. At a moment like this of real crisis, one that overshadows all else, we have a chance – though only a chance – to recognize this truth and develop our own critical perspective. A perspective that truly belongs to us, and not to others. And for that we have to thank a virus. The Coronavirus has put a bright spotlight on the true nature of our world, and in the process has called all of the previous dominant ideologies into question. The desperate flailing from the corporate media about this bad person or that bad country are meant to distract from this uncomfortable reality. Neoliberalism, neoconservatism, the idea of a wise, meritocratic elite have all been proven to be crazy cults. The only thing holding the whole thing together is western propaganda, which is first rate. But even that is starting to fray at the edges. Once the public has caught a glimpse of the naked emperor, well, you get the picture.

However, it’s becoming painfully obvious that our elite managers simply cannot imagine any other ideologies. For instance, as the pandemic calls into question our dubious expenditures on “defense”, which are apparently spent to enrich arms dealers, Joe Biden’s crack team of neoconservative foreign policy “intellectuals” proclaims that the US must gear up to confront China, and Russia.

Plus ça change, as the French say.

And, of course, the neoliberals haven’t changed their spots. Under cover of the public’s fear, and of justified concerns about the state of the economy and future employment, our government is transferring huge sums of public money to the biggest banks and corporations. Politicians controlled by big business and media owned by big business are pushing through this corporate robbery without scrutiny, for reasons that after Citizens v. United should be obvious. They know our attention is too overwhelmed by the virus for us to assess intentionally mystifying arguments about the supposed economic benefits, about yet more illusory trickle-down. Plus, your check for $1200 is in the mail. Trump said so.

I keep coming back to the idea of how in America our ideologies are fucked-up because of greed. Neoconservatives monetized the national security state because government is bad, or something, plus they have to make a buck. The neoliberals moved high-productivity, high-valued jobs offshore in order to raise corporate profits at the expense of domestic consumer incomes because of comparative advantage, or something, plus they can cash out their stock options.

I think Alan Greenspans came the closest to confessing to this cult of greedy-ideology when he admitted that there might be a flaw in his model. He had read so much Ayn Rand that he didn’t quite grasp the fact that his beloved hero’s were greed-driven short-term thinkers—people whose only vision was “I want even more.”

At this point in the game I think the only thing left is narrative. The whole thing just keeps rolling along thanks to our all-American propaganda where everyone has their own flavor of reality. 32 flavors of ways in which to justify the rotten edifice lurking below the surface.

Of course, we don’t have to accept this. The pandemic is an opportunity for a different world. It’s up to us. We have a choice between acceding more control to a dystopian nexus of corporate/government power as we did after 9/11. Or we can collectively recognize the massive failure everywhere of Western leadership and construct a more liveable and sustainable society.

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Back in the USSR

Posted on April 3, 2020 by camelotkidd

 

Imagine having a government that cares about average people, helping keep them safe during an emergency and ensuring that the costs of the crisis fall upon the members of society with the most?

You don’t know how lucky you are.

The Russian government, led by Vladimer Putin is quietly setting the example for competent governance that puts the average Russian citizen first as opposed to ours which serves of the wealthy and powerful.

Of course, you’d be hard pressed to learn of such information if you depend on the corporate media, who’ve spent the last fours years in a nonstop hue and cry about the perfidy of the dastardly Russians and the their evil leader bad-Vlad. In fact they’re still hard at work demonizing the Russians, even in the midst of the pandemic.

What’s amusing is that it doesn’t take Russia or any foreign government to highlight the way in which the Coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that the incompetent sociopaths who rule us are far more concerned about Wall Street profits than the American people, and for all intents and purposes have turned our country into the worlds largest corporate sacrifice zone.

The recent bailout demonstrated the priorities of President Trump and the thoroughly corrupt Congress. Congress just passed a $2 trillion stimulus package for which the American taxpayer will be held entirely responsible. Even worse, the new legislation contains a $500 billion allocation that the Federal Reserve will use as a capital base for borrowing $4.5 trillion. That massive sum of money will be used to buy toxic bonds in the corporate bond market, and fund underwater banks and hedge funds. These financial actors have gorged on the cheap money provided by the Fed for the last 12 years through Quantitative Easing (QE), in the process speculating on numerous socially destructive endeavors. The most pernicious misallocation of capital has been the shale oil boom driven by drillers with access to this unlimited supply of money. In the process they poisoned the water table and despoiled millions of acres, but who’s counting?

The larger problem is that the mis-investment in fracking was magnified by derivatives stacked upon derivatives like a ticking time-bomb.  The virus was merely the proximate cause. The problem had been festering for years and everyone in the financial community (including the Fed, the BIS and the IMF) knew that it was only a matter of time before it would explode.

Hence Trump’s phone call. On Monday Donald Trump called Russian president Vladimir Putin to discuss plunging oil prices that are wreaking havoc on America’s shale oil industry. The two leaders talked briefly about the coronavirus pandemic but quickly switched to Trump’s real concern which is oil production.

The phone call has gotten almost no coverage in the American media, which is to be expected since there’s no way to spin an incident in which an American president is clearly pleading to “evil” Putin for a favor.

While US leaders focus on the plunging stock market and exploding derivatives, back in the USSR, Russia, Putin has settled on a more rational and compassionate plan. He’s going to launch a relief program that actually focuses on the people who need it the most. Then, he’s going to cover the costs by taxing the people who are most capable of shouldering the burden.

Here’s an excerpt of the speech Putin delivered last week. “We also need to take additional steps, primarily to ensure the social protection of our people, their incomes and jobs, as well as support for small and medium-sized businesses, which employ millions of people….

First, all social protection benefits that our citizens are entitled to, should be renewed automatically over the next six months… if a family is entitled to subsidized housing and utility payments, they will not need to regularly confirm their per capita income to continue receiving this state support…all payments to war veterans and home-front workers timed to the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory, 75,000 and 50,000 rubles, respectively, should be made before the May holidays…

Second, it is essential to support families with children……..Third, we need to support those on sick leave and people who have lost their jobs.” 

It’s apparent that Putin understands that the health and welfare of the Russian people has to be put before the stock market, finance capital or sleazy corporate CEO’s. In contrast, Trump wants to put more people at risk of infection by sending them back to work after Easter.

In America, we make labor pay for the excesses of capital, while in Russia, the wealthy are asked to make sacrifices for the sake of the country. Which approach do you think is better?

Americans have been so propagandized in favor of rugged-individualism that they probably would rather die on the sidewalk than accept single-payer health care but the pandemic looks to seriously challenge that notion.

Meanwhile, trust in our feral elite and the corporate media is already waning. The lies about Washington’s wars—“weapons of mass destruction,” “Iranian nukes,” “Assad’s use of chemical weapons”—and the Russia-gate hoax, have seriously undermined the credibility of Washington and the US print and TV media.

However, it’s hard to get an old dog to learn new tricks. Imagine the reaction of the corporate media if Trump emulates Russia’s response in the aftermath of his phone call to Putin?

Jeebus! If you thought Russia-gate was bad, you ain’t seen nothing.

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Financial Feudalism

Posted on March 27, 2020 by camelotkidd

 

The Wall Street Crash of 2008, the bailout, and the Fed’s Quantitative Easing (QE) intensified inequality in America.

And now they’re getting the band back together.

Behind all the focus on the human toll of the pandemic there are quiet moves being made on Wall Street and corporate boardrooms to effect another bailout of the reckless financial institutions and companies that are underwater due to their risky bets and stock-buybacks.

Corporate and financial lobbyists are hard at work promoting all kinds of bailouts. You might have heard that Uncle Sam is gonna mail you a $1200 check but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Congress is considering a multi-trillion dollar bailout plan, an attempt to calm free falling markets and shape the American economy for the foreseeable future.

That’s right. A bailout is coming and guess who will get the lions share? The same people as last time. Does anyone believe that the government directed bailouts and the credit lines, will not be channelled principally to the political élites and their allies?

What is going down is disturbingly reminiscent of the 2008 bailouts. Twelve years ago, capitalism teetered on the brink of the abyss, its structural flaws exposed for anyone who cared to look. The 2008 crash almost broke the global financial system. It was saved by us, the taxpayers. The government delved deep into the pockets of the American people and transferred our money to the banks. Or rather the banksters.

And now the Fed is already injecting trillions into the financial markets. A trillion here, a couple trillion there, using an alphabet soup of lending facilities to cloak the scope of the bailout to the underwater banks and hedge funds.

I have to ask, how is this money suddenly available–when we have repeatedly been told in the wake of the 2008 crisis that austerity must be the only answer?

These “masters of the universe” should have wound up in prison after the crash of 2008, yet thanks to the Obama Administration the banks were saved by “socialising” their mistakes and losses. These losses transferred to the public balance sheet, and we have paid for those bail outs ever since with pared down health and welfare systems, not to mention the millions of Americans who were turfed-out of their homes. Since then, all of the gains of the re-financialization of our economy have gone to the 1%.

As a country we better wake up fast and ask wether we’re going to allow another bailout of the richest most powerful elite?

If Obama had helped distressed and unemployed people pay their mortgages and rent, it would have kept them in their homes, propped up the underlying mortgages that tanked derivatives and, therefore, saved the banks indirectly. Reducing the number of evictions would have mitigated the real estate crash caused by the deterioration of vacant houses.

Instead, the federal government handed over $7 trillion interest-free, no strings attached, to the big banks in exchange for increasing liquidity in the credit markets — which they never did. It’s still too hard to get a mortgage or other type of loan.

Not only that but it was the Fed’s ultra low rates for the past decade that made the tidal wave of stock buybacks possible, a tidal wave which became a tsunami in 2018 and 2019 after Trump allowed companies to repatriate over a $1 trillion in offshore cash at negligible tax rates, which unleashed a record stock buyback spree that was used to boost executive compensation and reward shareholders.

There’s a simple way to ensure that the banks and corporations can’t loot the republic a second time in 12 years, as economist Thomas Ferguson explains. “Put simply, if the public is to be called upon for the second time in twelve years to bail out banks and businesses, it should get something back for its money. It can’t simply be asked to shoulder losses; it needs to share in any upside.”

This crisis is also a good opportunity to redistribute wealth to create a more equitable world than the one where a plutocratic class can just buy up entire governments and media organizations, and exert their will.

But instead we’re hearing from our ruling sociopaths saying it would be better for a few million older Americans to die than for the financial markets take any losses.

The end game is becoming clear: a corrupt takeover by the financial oligarchy deliberately impoverishing the rest of the population. But most of all, the crisis will give Trump and our corrupt Congress an excuse to give enormous bailouts to banks and companies that already were near insolvency as a result of their own debt problem. They hope to use the crisis not to revive the economy, but to just pound it into debt deflation, leaving the debts in place while bailing out the banks and the landlord class.

So basically the virus crisis is a fundamental restructuring of the US economy designed to strengthen the grip of the corrupt corporate-banking oligarchy while sacrificing the wage-earning population.

Welcome to the new financial feudalism.

Update: The bailout of Wall Street in 2008 resulted in mass outrage and Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Now the Senate passed a bailout 4 times larger and forever QE. But most of the nation is stuck inside on lockdown and unable to protest.

How convenient.

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A World Turned Upside Down

Posted on March 20, 2020 by camelotkidd

 

When the British surrendered at Yorktown at the close of the Revolutionary War their commander, General Cornwallis, was so distraught that he feigned illness and instead had his subordinate proffer his sword to General Washington. The tenor of the cataclysmic event was captured by the British bands who played the song “The World Turned Upside Down” as the British and Hessian troops marched out to surrender.

And now the Coronavirus pandemic has turned our world upside down. Indeed, in the space of a couple weeks it’s apparent that we live in a completely different place.

Covid-19 is the new “Transformative Event,” in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security. Like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, the pandemic promises to divide our past and future into a before and an after.

Coronavirus has devastated financial markets, especially Wall Street. We find ourselves at the epicenter of three interconnected shocks: A loss of supply; an oil price shock; and now a financial and liquidity crisis.

It’s more than ironic that here we are entering the second financial crisis of my adult life with pretty much the same feral elite in charge.

However, the pandemic will force our neoliberal policy makers to rethink all of their previous shibboleths. When Mitt–(Makers and Takers)–Romney is offering every American a K-note, you can be sure that something has fundamentally changed.

The pandemic has also exposed our reliance on corporate actors in lieu of a representative democracy. Political analyst, Matt Stoller says that “There’s a good amount of grumbling about the state of American infrastructure—collapsing bridges, high-speed rail, etc. But American infrastructure is not just about public goods, it’s about how the corporations that enforce, inform and organize economic activity are themselves organized. Are they doing productive research? Are they spreading knowledge and know-how to people who will use it responsibly? Are they creating prosperity or extracting wealth using raw power? And most importantly, are they contributing to the robustness of our society, such that we can survive and thrive in the normal course of emergencies? The answer to all of these questions right now is no.”

The Coronavirus has also further exposed the corporate media as shameless propaganda organs. Moreover, it’s becoming obvious that the corporate media propaganda machine will not be able to hide the truth from the American people, and the consequences of this crisis will reverberate. Trump can brag how the US is the “greatest country in the world” but the pandemic is revealing the weakness in our reliance on the private sector to save the day, and moreover just how utterly dysfunctional America has become after 40 odd years of neoliberal ideology. And, no, Walmart and Amazon will not save the day.

The pandemic has changed and promises to continue to change our world. However, Rahm Emmanual’s phrase–Never let a serious crisis go to waste–works both ways. Typically, as Naomi Klein pointed out more than a decade ago, the wealthy and corporations they control have used disasters to advance their agenda of cuts, privatisation and deregulation, securing unpopular policies when people are too overwhelmed by disaster to resist.

However, I believe the pandemic is an opportunity for positive change. It can take down the American empire; it can destroy the ideology of our selfish neoliberal market economy; it can jump-start meaningful community-oriented innovation; and it can fundamentally change the way we organize our lives. This is a potent moment — a creative moment. It’s a great chance, if we can individually and collectively find our hearts again.

As we start to enter periods of quarantine and self-isolation – as nations, communities and individuals, all of this should become apparent. It has taken a virus to remind us of what it really means to be most alive and most human.

Going further, in being stripped of what we need most by the threat of contagion, we are reminded of how much we have taken community for granted, abused it, hollowed it out. Ever since Thatcher and Reagan, we have been told quite literally: “There is no such thing as society.” How will that ideology stand the test of the coming weeks and months? How much can we survive as individuals, even in quarantine, rather than as part of communities that care for all of us?

In the meantime, enjoy all the personal opportunities the pandemic is offering. Like time with your loved ones. Or time away from a tedious bull-shit job. Or the ability to slow down and savor life. So much of our hustle-bustle lives involve a lot of stupid shit and worry about things that, in retrospect, are unimportant.

I’m convinced that this crisis will bring out the best and the worst in people. As we go forward why not bring out your best?

Carpe diem.

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Life During Wartime

Posted on March 13, 2020 by camelotkidd

 

I feel like I’m an extra in a science fiction movie lately, where every new day brings more crazy news. It’s like we’re all being overtaken by events.

I keep coming back to the old Chinese proverb–May you live in interesting times.

It sounds benign until you experience something like a worldwide pandemic and then suddenly boring doesn’t seem so bad.

Anyway, I’ve come up with a short playlist to try and maintain some sense of sanity in our increasingly chaotic milieu. Feel free to add your own favorites.

Talking Heads–Life During Wartime:

Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons
Packed up and ready to go
Heard of some grave sites, out by the highway
A place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance
I’m getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, lived in the ghetto
I’ve lived all over this town

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco
This ain’t no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey
I ain’t got time for that now…

 

R.E.M. It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake
Birds and snakes, and aeroplanes
And Lenny Bruce is not afraid

Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn
World serves its own needs
Don’t mis-serve your own needs
Speed it up a notch, speed, grunt, no, strength
The ladder starts to clatter
With a fear of height, down, height
Wire in a fire, represent the seven games
And a government for hire and a combat site
Left her, wasn’t coming in a hurry
With the Furies breathing down your neck

Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped
Look at that low plane, fine, then
Uh oh, overflow, population, common group
But it’ll do, save yourself, serve yourself
World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed
Tell me with the Rapture and the reverent in the…

 

And, finally–Doris Day: Que Sera Sera

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be, will be…

 

Be safe out there and love you neighbors.

 

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Katrina Moment

Posted on March 13, 2020 by camelotkidd

 

The Coronavirus appears to be Trump’s Katrina moment, where the pandemic is exposing the rank incompetence of his administration.

If you’ll recall from the way-back machine, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that the Bush Administration’s neoconservative ideology was a serious problem. Katrina, a Category 3 storm, had smashed into the Gulf South, and people were drowning. Meanwhile, the president of the United States played guitar in San Diego, then flew over the disaster site at 30,000 feet. Even W’s most stalwart supporters cringed at his disconnect from reality.

Republicans have run against government since forever, but when they are in charge this ideology becomes a real problem. It turns out that the American people like competent government, especially when disaster strikes.

Meanwhile, Trump managed to make a bad situation worse with his speech the other night. No serious detail on what to do to save lives, save the lame idea of a travel ban from Europe, which means efectively flights to Europe too.

It appears that the Trump administration only started to care when the Dow Jones plummeted. Don’t expect them to call for a shutdown as that will cost their donor’s some money. It certainly appears that goosing stocks is all that our feral elite really care about despite their arguments otherwise. All the ‘solutions we are seeing from the powers that be are reminiscent of the great financial crisis. Bailing out Wall Street while structural issues surrounding allocation of resources remain. Where are the hospital beds, ICUs, doctors, medical equipment and vaccine R&D?

The American public is starting to notice this indifference. Even Republicans are starting to question the president’s actions in response to the pandemic.

This has been a long time coming. Republicans have had a nice scam going where they could campaign against the incompetence of government, then in power they could work industriously at making it so. I’ve likened them to termites, burrowing away at the foundations of our republic.

But the gig is just about up.

Trump could totally own the neoliberal Democrats if he were to revert to the populist he campaigned as. Imagine if he broke from Republican orthodoxy and offered up a robust fiscal stimulus plan rather than his offer of a payroll tax cut, which is largely a stealth attack on Social Security?

Neoliberal Democrats would shit themselves. Indeed the former party of labor has abandoned any notions of good governance to the alter of the market, where we shouldn’t expect much but economic management from government, and that citizens are meant to be unleashed into unemcumbered markets.

An effective stimulus would have to help the small and medium sized businesses that are sure to suffer from a prolonged economic downturn. This stimulus would also have to aid Americans who don’t work or are part of the gig economy. This would reduce the number of unnecessary personal and corporate bankruptcies, make sure people have money to keep spending even if they are not working. A side benefit of this would be to subsidise the sort of self-quarantine that is needed to help reduce the spread of the virus.

Unfortunately, the probability is that both the neoconservative Republicans and neoliberal Democrats will rally around a stimulus plan that helps their true constituents–the banks and powerful corporations that fund their reelection campaigns. I have a bad feeling that any government largesse will flow to the usual suspects similar to the response to the Wall Street Crash of 2008, where the banksters were bailed out while homeowners were left to twist slowly in the wind.

Despite the corporate media’s focus on primaries, voting and the personalities of the candidates, politics is truly about who gets what and who pays the price for these policies.

I’m afraid the pandemic is going to offer the American people an objective lesson in this fundamental dynamic.

 

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