The Blob

Posted on June 14, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

Perhaps–The Blob–is a better description of America’s permanent national security bureaucracy than–Deep State.

Former President Obama certainly thought so. The moniker comes from Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes who nicknamed the US foreign policy establishment as “The Blob” in a New York Times Magazine profile. Obama also talked about breaking with “the Washington Playbook” when he decided not to declare a no-fly zone in Syria in response to the disputed use of chemical weapons.

Of course, Obama did initiate Timber Sycamore, a covert CIA program to train and utilize al Qaeda terrorists to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar Assad. So in reality, Obama didn’t actually break with the Washington Playbook, he just followed the Democratic method of utilizing terrorist proxies and drone strikes rather than the Republican style of violent invasions to affect regime change. It was a matter of style, really.

Otherwise those $400,000 speaking payments wouldn’t be on offer, now would they? Or all the millions of dollars that corporate supporters plowed into his Chicago presidential museum?

This state of affairs is starting to become problematic for a so-called democratic republic. Despite all the power that has flowed to the modern executive branch, apparently every president is still beholden to The Blob and by extension, the Washington Playbook.

It’s always been obvious that Russia-gate was about making this relationship clear to Trump, the interloper.

It’s an open secret that the so-called foreign policy establishment did not think Donald Trump was qualified to become US president. While it is not too surprising that Democratic foreign policy experts would oppose a Trump presidency, there was enormous push back from the Republican side of the foreign policy establishment.

Indeed, the most obvious obstacle between any noninterventionist candidate and mainstream success is D.C.’s foreign-policy Establishment. The establishment is made up of politicians and foreign policy intellectuals and media personalities and intelligence professionals and defense-company contractors who determine the bounds of acceptable thinking on war and peace. This foreign policy establishment will acknowledge that past American wars of regime change, for which it enthusiastically advocated, have been disastrous, but it somehow maintains faith in the power of America hegemony, which in practice means overthrowing governments that The Blob doesn’t care for, like Cuba or Venezuala or Iran, or Russia, or China.

If you’ll recall, The Blob went into a hysterical hissy fit when Trump lambasted the invasion of Iraq and the regime-change-happy foreign polices of recent years, while promising a reset with Russia.

The Blob then responded to Trump’s 2016 election win with a fantastic story of Trump being a Russian agent under the express control of Vladimir Putin, rather than examining the disastrous neoliberal/neoconservative policies of the last 40 years. In doing so they deployed every aspect of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, that make up The Blob colluded in a soft coup to neuter or remove an American president from office on the basis of an invented conspiracy.

While not driving Trump from office it appears that Russia-gate has managed to block Trump from efforts at detente with Russia, to initiate Cold War 2.0, and to turn liberals into bloodthirsty war mongers.

Like a recent president, who we’ll not mention, declared–Mission Accomplished.

Still, things are not all hunky dory inside The Blob. What truly worries the foreign policy establishment  is that America’s unipolar moment is coming to an end, thanks in large part to the sheer incompetence of the elites that make up the very same foreign policy establishment. The problem is compounded by the emergence of a multipolar world led by the alliance between Russia and China, a strategic partnership, that’s thrown these elites into a hysterical overreaction.

If we’re honest, that’s what’s driving US foreign and domestic policies. From Russia-gate to the trade war with China to the threatened attack on Iran to the use of al Qaeda terrorists in Syria, it’s apparent that The Blob will stop at nothing to maintain their empire.

Update: Jesus! It’s worse than I could have imagined.

“For all the outrage that liberals display whenever a high-profile Republican utters the phrase “deep state”, it sure is interesting that the Commander-in-Chief has found himself in a situation where he is at the whim of a collective of warmongers who are advancing pre-existing agendas against a nation they perceive as a geostrategic threat to US hegemony. It begs the question, who is really in charge?”

 

Posted in neoconservatives, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Better policies, please

Posted on June 6, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

Why is right-wing populism surging while left-wing populism lies moribund?

Historically, we know how right-wing populism advances. Economic malaise coupled with liberal paralysis. When the economy sucks, workers are ripe for appeals against scapegoats. Immigrants, minorities, woman and queers are all fair game when times are hard. Witness Europe’s experience since the 2008 financial crisis, when the EU’s turn towards austerity has led to the reemergence of home-grown fascism across the continent.

In this milieu, right-wing populism is the flip-side of neoliberal market freedoms that our elite have embraced for 40 odd years. For the political class and corporate media, however, this racism or sexism or xenophobia is simply the result of “deplorable’s” being deplorable as if the bi-partisan governance that fronts for the oligarchs, bears no responsibility for the consequences of four decades of neoliberal rule.

Here in the US, the Democrats co-invented identity politics to defer blame for the consequences of their policies. If they cared about combatting racism and xenophobia, none of the Democratic Party establishment would be considered for public office. Watching the DNC move heaven and earth to squash Bernie’s campaign while promoting Biden’s, it’s apparent that Talleyrand was on to something when he remarked about the Bourbons, “they have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.”

If the Democrats truly wanted to defeat Trump, they have a clear path to victory via Bernie Sanders. But placating their corporate donors is their first priority, not carrying out the will of the people. As far as the DNC is concerned, it’s more important to squelch the Progressive wing of their own party than to oust the current administration.

Conversely, right-wing candidates who speak to class issues, but who do so by harnessing a false consciousness — e.g. blaming immigrants and minorities for capitalism’s ills, rather than capitalists — will win back those same voters who would have voted for a more class-conscious left candidate.

Why hasn’t the Democratic Party heeded this truism? In, Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank demonstrated that the Democratic Party has transformed into the party of wealthy professionals who prefer the Democratic Party to be left on social issues but right on economic issues. The party elite see these wealthy folks as part of the party, and don’t want to nominate a candidate who accurately sees them as class enemies.

The party’s leaders see themselves as the left wing of capital — supporting social policies that liberal rich people can get behind, never daring to enact economic reforms that might cause rich liberals to have to pay more taxes. Hence, the establishment seems intent on anointing the centrist Democrats of capital, who push liberal social policies and neoliberal economic policies.

This is why identity politics are all the rage with wealthy liberals.

With identity politics, there is no such thing as collective action. By shifting the burden of responsibility to individuals for their own power and wellbeing, identity politics has been able to disenfranchise huge segments of the electorate and sell us on a political action that’s harmless to the ruling elite. Identity politics shift the burden of change to the individual, just like the advertising industry uses manufactured problems, like bad breath, or body odor, to sell us products. We can celebrate our identity all we want, there’s even a product they’ll sell us to magnify our differences. Or to herd us into our own self reinforcing enclosure of highly-individualized feeds, where market-approved talking points are slipped through paid ads and recommended content.

I could care less if a leader is a man or a woman, black or white, straight or gay, or a transexual. All I care about are policies that aid the vast majority of Americans and make our lives better. Ultimately, it’s the policies and incentives behind them that shape our leaders rather than their skin color or sexual orientation. For instance, liberals thrilled at the election of Barak Obama, a brilliant and charismatic African-American senator, who promised Hope and Change. Of course, he provided neither and his election appears now to have been one big con, propelled by marketing.

At the time, many Americans were anticipating that Obama would initiate a crackdown on the “banksters” who had knowingly rigged the economy out of short-sighted greed. However, Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, believed that foaming the runway with American homeowners for Wall Street’s crash landing was the proper response. Meanwhile, it was clean getaway for the “banksters”, who’ve been made whole due the Fed’s quantitative easing policies and are now more powerful than ever. The whole exercise was the opposite of FDR’s Pecora Commission, which investigated the causes of the 1929 Wall Street crash and subpoenaed high profile bankers to testify.

Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people. As we’ve seen, replacing George W. Bush with Barak Obama did not suddenly transform America. Nor did the election of Donald Trump suddenly make America great again.

It’s all about the policies.

Better policies, please.

 

Posted in neoliberals | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Manufacturing Representation

Posted on May 30, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

The United States is nominally a democratic republic, where we have congressional members and senators who represent us, but I’ve come to understand that it’s more like a managed democracy.

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, published in 1988, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky exposed the techniques that the corporate media used to promote and defend the economic, social and political agendas of the ruling elites. This controversial book, deconstructed the idea that the media is objective and argued instead that it’s a disseminator of state and business propaganda.

To analyze the corporate media, Herman and Chomsky devised a propaganda model with five filters that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These are: Ownership, Funding, Sourcing, Flak, and Anti-communism or “fear ideology”.

What if we use their propaganda model as a device to examine how our representative democracy truly operates?

  1. Ownership. Many of our representatives and almost all of our senators are quite wealthy. Similar to large media corporations, this wealth strongly influences their class interests and skews the type of policies they pursue, which primarily is the maintenance of private regimes of power. As Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi explained–“We’re capitalists and that’s just the way it is.”
  2. Funding. Our legislators spend 4 hours on average per day raising money for re-election. Think that might influence the laws they pass? And, where does that money come from? With all that money to raise, they logically have to pursue funding from those who have lots of it–the 1% and the corporations they control.
  3. Sourcing or expertise. Our legislators are notoriously stupid. (For example, my representative, a Democrat, has proposed a balanced budget amendment). Plus they have bigger concerns than policy expertise, like raising money. For policy expertise they largely rely on their staff, and on ideological think-tanks, like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), for policy expertise. Never heard of ALEC? You’re not alone. This right-wing think tank provides cut-and-paste bills for our congress-critters to introduce and is secretly responsible for so much of the horrible legislation that gives Congress the approval rating of pool slime.
  4. Flak. This is the means by which powerful interests discipline our representatives or senators who might slip off the reservation and support legislation that actually does something good for the American people. Think of the Chamber of Commerce, or the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), or the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC). The last one might be the most powerful source of flak on Capital Hill, forcing our representatives to reflexively support the sorts of belligerent foreign policies that have kept the US bogged down in the Middle-East for decades.
  5. Anti-communism or fear ideology. This relates to flak, in that it’s a powerful cudgel that’s used to keep representatives in line as far as pursuing the interests of empire. In case you haven’t noticed the Cold War against communism has been over for 30 years, yet terrorism filled in nicely until Russia-gate came along to resurrect a peer competitor necessary to keep the Military/Industrial/Complex (MIC) humming along. And, even after the success enjoyed by Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries, socialism is still a pejorative right up there with communism. For Democratic Socialist representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) this hatred has led to numerous death threats. While you may not appreciate her political orientation, watch this video of AOC questioning lobbyists about the role of money in politics to see how a true representative should behave.

This is just a quick snapshot of how our political system functions. Don’t like the bank bailouts, endless wars, obscene drug prices, savage inequality, tax cuts for the wealthy and environmental devastation? Too bad. This the representation that we have and it’s far from a democratic republic that our founders envisioned.

This little exercise also demonstrates how our rigged system of representation dovetails with our corporate media propaganda in a way that maintains this state of affairs. Manufacturing Consent was published 30 years ago in a bygone era. Since then we’ve had the introduction of 24-hour cable news stations, the rise of right-wing radio and Fox News, and the creation of the internet and social media.

Now, not only does the corporate media generate propaganda to manufacture consent, they also manufacture hatred that keeps us  all in our tribal enclosures.

Our faux system of representation has followed this divisive blueprint. Instead of policies it’s personalities, keeping the American people distracted by the spectacle that I’ve described before as kayfabe.

With our Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame-president, its never been easier.

 

 

 

Posted in propaganda | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Strange Bedfellows

Posted on May 23, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

The New Deal, which did much to equalize and humanize American capitalism, has always been despised by the plutocracy that owns our country. The reasons for this hatred were largely about power and control as outlined in the Political Aspects of Full Employment, in 1943, by Polish economist Michael Kalacki.

“Every widening of state activity is looked upon by business with suspicion, but the creation of employment by government spending has a special aspect which makes the opposition particularly intense.  Under a laissez-faire system the level of employment depends to a great extent on the so-called state of confidence.  If this deteriorates, private investment declines, which results in a fall of output and employment (both directly and through the secondary effect of the fall in incomes upon consumption and investment).  This gives the capitalists a powerful indirect control over government policy: everything which may shake the state of confidence must be carefully avoided because it would cause an economic crisis.  But once the government learns the trick of increasing employment by its own purchases, this powerful controlling device loses its effectiveness.  Hence budget deficits necessary to carry out government intervention must be regarded as perilous.  The social function of the doctrine of ‘sound finance’ is to make the level of employment dependent on the state of confidence.”

So basically the New Deal, which put Americans back to work through government efforts, subsumed the wealthy owners power and control. No wonder they hated it.

Neoliberalism was their response to the progressive reforms brought about by this  government intervention. While the economists and political theorists who met at Mont Pèlerin, depicted their efforts as saving humanity from the long and painful road to serfdom, the end result has been a return to the type of power enjoyed by the robber barons of the Gilded Age.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

The neoliberal theory that best sums up how the masters of the universe have been able to reestablish control over the economy is shareholder capitalism. “Epitomized by neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, the theory of shareholder capitalism states that the only social responsibility of a corporation is to increase its profits, laying the groundwork for the idea that shareholders, being the owners and the main risk-bearing participants, ought therefore to receive the biggest rewards. Profits therefore should be generated first and foremost with a view toward maximizing the interests of shareholders, not the executives or managers who (according to the theory) were spending too much of their time, and the shareholders’ money, worrying about employees, customers, and the community at large. The economists who built on Friedman’s work, along with increasingly aggressive institutional investors, devised solutions to ensure the primacy of enhancing shareholder value, via the advocacy of hostile takeovers, the promotion of massive stock buybacks or repurchases (which increased the stock value), higher dividend payouts and, most importantly, the introduction of stock-based pay for top executives in order to align their interests to those of the shareholders. These ideas were influenced by the idea that corporate efficiency and profitability were impinged upon by archaic regulation and unionization, which, according to the theory, precluded the ability to compete globally.”

This pernicious theory has long had its critics, including yours truly, but now something strange is happening.

Marco Rubio, of all people, has fired the latest salvo against shareholder capitalism. Rubio–neocon extraordinaire–normally spends his days plotting regime change against Cuba or Nicaragua or Venezuela.

In a new report, “American Investment in the 21st Century,”  Rubio sounds almost like socialist Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and puts the blame squarely on institutional changes in corporate management and capital markets that demand a single-minded emphasis on short-term financial results over sustainable growth. What’s amazing is that the only reason this sounds so radical is because for so long Republicans like Rubio have reflexively supported anything that the plutocracy and the corporations they own have proposed.

I really don’t know what’s gotten into him but Rubio argues that the prevailing business model of shareholder value—the idea that the only goal of a corporation is to return the maximum value to its owners—is ruining us. “The decline of business investment in the U.S. is not due to inexplicable secular shifts in the economy, nor a lack of capital available for investment, but a misallocation of productive resources. This misallocation is driven by the choices of political and social institutions that do not properly prioritize the obligation of the American economy to reproduce itself.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I guess politics really does make strange bedfellows.

Update: What the fuck! Is there something in the water?

Rahm Emanuel says It’s Time to Hold American Elites Accountable for Their Abuses. “[E]ven after being bailed out, the nation’s banking executives never faced any real consequences. No one went to jail. They never had to repay the personal fortunes they’d made by passing out those bad loans. Once again, the middle class was called to bail out the elites who were responsible for the mess while the elites got off scot-free…. As the White House chief of staff, I argued, unsuccessfully, that the American people needed the catharsis of seeing that the bankers who had gotten the country into this mess were being forced to take responsibility—that faith in government would plummet if we failed to deliver some ‘Old Testament justice.’”

Posted in neoliberals | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The man from Delaware

Posted on May 16, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

For the corporate and elite Democratic supporters who are desperate to stop a Sanders campaign, Joe Biden’s official entrance has been a godsend. Early polls put Biden ahead of Sanders by as many as 20 points and the same pundits who called the 2016 race prematurely on both sides of the aisle were quick to pronounce the primary all but over.

Biden’s campaign is also the clearest sign yet that the Democratic party elites and donors, who are faced with a restless party base and an insurgent Sanders candidacy that appears popular, will continue to look to anyone they believe might restore a sense of normalcy.

As you, dear reader, might imagine, I’m not happy. I mean, Joe Biden? Joe-freakin-Biden? Jesus! It’s almost like the DNC is trolling us with Biden’s entry into the crowded Democratic presidential primary.

If there’s one person who represents pretty much all that’s wrong with America, it’s Biden, who is a hawkish, corporate sycophant and one of the principal architects of American mass incarceration that’s decimated African-American households. Going further, Biden epitomizes the abject corruption of our elite that set the table for Donald Trump. If we’re honest it’s apparent that a large part of Trump’s appeal was his attack on the sort of business-as usual and corruption that Biden represents.

Biden’s not even shy about it. Recently Biden told supporters at a private fundraising event in Los Angeles that he hails from the “corporate state of Delaware”.

In fact, Biden’s exactly the sort of Democrat that for decades has traded working-class votes for employer-class donations. Biden supported NAFTA, most-favored-nation trading status with China, and the Trans-Pacific-Partnership. Democrats don’t just have a problem with working-class white voters, but a problem with working-class voters of all races and backgrounds — lost to the party over the years due to frustrations with free-trade policies, a 50-year decline in real wages, disillusionment with bipartisan-supported foreign wars and their costs for military families, failure to regulate an increasingly exploitative financial-services sector, exploding incarceration rates, etc.

Biden was there every step of the way as America was transformed from a manufacturing economy where the gains were more equally shared to a financial economy that funnels all the gains to the 1%. In the process, Americans went from largely sharing in the productive economy with rising wages to being shackled with debt.

Biden also represents something deeper and darker in a Democratic Party that’s embraced a neoliberal dispensation that’s left our nation riven by a vast inequality not seen since the robber baron era. Indeed, Biden represents the wholesale capture of Democratic Party politics by the big banks and financial services industry. According to the New York Times, Biden was seen as so close to MBNA, the credit card company that was purchased by Bank of America, that he was referred to as the “senator from MBNA.” Instead of the standard senate designation (D-Delaware), he was (D-MBNA).

Biden is a senator from Delaware, where as he noted, pretty much all of US corporations are incorporated. Delaware, the second smallest of US states, is home to many of the worlds biggest corporations, and is a key cog in the offshore tax haven system. Delaware has long been a refuge for financial capital thanks largely to the du Pont family, who used their tremendous influence in state governance to adopt a new and permissive corporate law that allowed corporate owners and managers enormous powers at the expense of other stakeholders. Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1971 and no doubt has spent more than three decades getting financial support from the banking interests that call Delaware their home.

I believe that one of the key reasons for Biden’s ascendency is precisely because he’s the man from Delaware, where the tiny state is a key node in the financing of US deficits by attracting foreign capital that flows in due to the tax-free treatment and secrecy that afforded.

Ultimately, what Biden and Delaware represent is a world where there are set of rules for the rich and powerful and another set of rules for the rest of us.

 

 

 

 

Posted in neoliberals | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Opportunity Costs of Empire

Posted on May 8, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

So far, the large and growing cohort of Democratic presidential candidates have been focused on domestic policies and largely avoided (with the sole exception of Tulsi Gabbard) examining America’s empire.

Conventional wisdom has it that Americans vote their pocketbooks. It’s the economy, stupid. Absent a war or recent terrorist attack, political consultants believe that voters prioritize domestic issues. Right now, this appears to be correct. According to the latest Pew Research poll, the five most important issues for Democrats are–healthcare, education, Medicare, poverty and the environment.

So it’s not surprising that the major Democratic presidential contenders’ campaigns are focusing on economic and other domestic issues. Nor is it shocking that the corporate media is ignoring their stances on foreign policy, and especially ignoring Tulsi Gabbard.

But, the foreign policies that America pursues reflect our values and ultimately our morality, as Martin Luther King expressed in his Riverside Church speech exactly one year before he was assassinated.

At the Riverside Church, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, 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 politically-tame 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. This link should not be surprising. Everyone from Eugene Debs, to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Paul Craig Roberts have known you cannot sustain freedom at home in a global context shaped by militarism, unchecked corporate power, and empire.

50 years on it’s clear that King’s words were prophetic. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

It’s probably a safe bet that none of the leading Democratic contenders for president will acknowledge this truth. They probably won’t talk much at all about US foreign policies or the fact that the US spends more on war than any other country, largely to maintain our far-flung empire.

But they should. Our foreign policies are simply a reflection on our morality, and an examination of said policies would reveal a sharp contradiction to the feel-good American exceptionalism that passes for reflection.

Not only that but foreign policy is a subject that should put Trump on his back-foot. For all  his campaign rhetoric about ending regime-change wars and nurturing better relations with Russia, Trump has turned out to be just like Obama, who turned out to be just like Bush. It seems that when it comes to foreign policy, US presidents are locked into the Deep-State consensus.

In Trump’s case, the hysteria around Russia-gate has severely limited his options. In my opinion, the three year effort has made it clear that Trump could deviate from the Deep-State script at his own peril.

Still, a lot of Trump’s aggressive foreign policies revolve around domestic considerations. Whether threatening Iran with destruction to please the Jewish neoconservatives, and evangelicals who would welcome Armageddon. Or threatening Venezuela to pander to the right-wing Cubans of South Florida who would celebrate an overthrow of the Maduro administration, these belligerent foreign policies are a way for Trump to appeal for votes ahead of the 2020 election.

It’s not just Trump either. Our bi-partisan, ruling establishment has made it quite clear that the most important thing is an American-empire based on violence.

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of us, endless war for empire has come at an outrageous expense to our soul and our pocketbook. Recently, former US President Jimmy Carter articulated these opportunity costs of empire.

“The US is the most warlike nation in the world, forcing other countries to adopt our American principles. How many miles of high-speed railroads do we have in this country? China has around 18,000 miles (29,000 km) of high speed rail lines while the US has wasted, I think, $3 trillion on military spending; it’s more than you can imagine. China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you’d probably have $2 trillion leftover; we’d have high-speed railroads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of, say, South Korea or Hong Kong.”

Carter means well, but I think he’s confusing a bug with a feature of our New World Order.

In George Orwell’s 1984, Emmanuel Goldstein explains that the purpose of war, “is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”

 

 

Posted in neoconservatives, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Everybody Knows

Posted on May 2, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

Ten years on from the Wall Street Crash, it’s quite apparent that something is different.

I was reminded of this yesterday reading the Sunday comics, where author, Scott Adams, has one of the characters in Dilbert being confronted. “Weren’t you the cause of the catastrophe? Exactly. That’s why I’m the only person who knows how to fix it. Are you blackmailing me? No. It’s nothing like that. Wouldn’t I be rewarding you for failure? Let’s not label it.”

And we haven’t labeled it, but everybody knows.

Everybody knows that the criminals got away with the haul while the rest of us have suffered from the consequences of the epic criminality. Likewise, everybody knows that in the aftermath not one of the perpetrators did a day of jail time. Going further, everybody now knows that there’s a bifurcated rule of law–one set of laws for the wealthy and powerful, and a much more draconian set for us shlubs.

And now, as if we needed another reminder of the impunity of our ownership-class, Boeing’s 737 Max tragedies offer a stark example of all that wrong with neoliberal capitalism. Just like the Wall Street Crash, but maybe even more obvious, Boeing’s failures resonate with the public in a way that no complicated financial fraud possibly could. Only a few financial analysts understood the mind-numbing complexity of derivatives, but everyone understands the sheer terror of a plane crash, like the doomed Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max accidents.

It’s not hard to spot the parallels between the 2008 global financial crisis and the Boeing crashes. In both cases, years of neoliberal deregulatory efforts set the stage for tragedy. Much like the FAA with Boeing, in 2008, our monetary authorities, regulators and ratings agencies were starved of adequate resources and expertise to properly scrutinize the activities of Wall Street’s financial engineers. In both cases the foxes were left to guard the henhouse, with predictable results. In the case of the Wall Street Crash, experts such as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, assured us that that there was no need to regulate credit default swaps because the banks could regulate themselves. We all know how that turned out.

Similarly, the MCAS software that was going to solve the engineering problem of the new 737 failed, because it was based on a flawed solution–no computer software can fundamentally repudiate the principles of aerodynamics. And in both cases, the regulatory capture and inadequate financial resources accorded to the agencies tasked with oversight precluded them from stepping in before disaster struck. Hence, the FAA did not once highlight the risks of the new anti-stall system when it certified the 737 Max as airworthy some two years ago, according to the Washington Post. This is because Boeing had already attested to the plane’s fundamental fly-worthiness, just as Wall Street funded credit agencies gave the thumbs-up on dodgy securities. Consequently, both Boeing and a multitude of financial institutions post-2008 suffered “crashes.”

And, here we are, where everybody who has half a brain cell knows the rotten score.

I’ve come to believe that the last three years of Russia-gate hysteria are related to this unspoken truth, all so the mandarins who direct this country don’t have to face the fact that Americans elected Donald Trump president, not because they were brainwashed by Russians, or had any illusions about what a thuggish, self-aggrandizing buffoon he is, but because they were so disgusted with the neoliberal Washington establishment, and the global capitalist elites that own it, that they leapt at the chance to vote against it.

There is a dim awareness of this percolating sentiment on the campaign trail. For instance, when a reporter asked whether he had a message to the world. Biden replied: “America’s coming back like we used to be — ethical, straight, telling the truth . . . supporting our allies, all those good things.”

Ha, ha. Tell us another one, creepy-uncle-Joe.

Leonard Cohen wrote an perfectly dark analogy of a country that talks a good game about freedom and democracy, or family values, or bright-shining-city-on-the-hill, but really, everybody knows.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Posted in neoliberals | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Dream Candidate

Posted on April 24, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

I’ve come to realize that Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is the perfect Listen Liberal, dream candidate.

If you read the book you totally know what I’m talking about and if you didn’t, I’ll explain.

Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has come out of nowhere and is suddenly being viewed as a plausible presidential contender. “Mayor Pete” has already been compared to Obama as an orator, a scholar, (Buttigieg is a graduate of Harvard University and Oxford University), and a potential unifier of the Democratic Party and the nation. It has even been hinted that Obama looks favorably on Buttigieg as a semi-anointed successor.

Then there’s the fact that it appears that Mayor Pete is a classic neoliberal reformer, (like Obama), with little awareness of inequality and zero interest in structural economic changes or in rethinking America’s role in the world. In other words, the perfect Listen Liberal dream candidate.

In Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank describes a Democratic Party that has transformed from a working-class party to one that’s dominated by professionals, who view credentials, education and meritocracy as the solution to the vast inequality as it exists in the USA.

Indeed, as Frank points out, the “Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.”

Frank lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party’s philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party’s old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it’s been a descent into a much more unequal and savage existence.

By 2016, the widespread unpopularity of all of this shit–the neoliberal, neoconservative, Wall Street and military-industrial complex friendly politics–helped Trump secure an Electoral College victory. Since then the Democratic Party has pretty clearly demonstrated that they would rather lose to Trump with anyone, rather than win with Bernie.

Obama was the perfect candidate for the professional class that makes up the modern Democratic Party, and now Mayor Pete answers the bell as their new champion.

Posted in neoliberals | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Propaganda is Bipartisan

Posted on April 18, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, consevatives were whipped into a frenzy by propaganda. During Russia-gate, it’s been the liberals turn to be whipped into a frenzy by  propaganda.

It appears that propaganda is bipartisan.

Going further, both liberals and conservatives are subjected to relentless psychological and emotional conditioning by the ruling classes and the corporate media since the day they were born. This propaganda assault largely consists of free-market and American exceptionalism appeals and has been repeated over and over in a manner to make it extremely clear that any contradicting views would be completely unwelcome and might negatively affect their social status and prospects for professional advancement.

Indeed, the higher ones social and professional status, the more intensive the propaganda. It’s no accident that the most sophisticated propaganda resides in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, media consumed regularly by the managerial classes. While these are all good sources of information and sometimes brilliantly written, their primary purpose is to reinforce the official narratives of the ruling classes.

Logic, facts, and actual evidence have little to nothing to do with this process. The goal of the media and other propagandists is not to deceive or mislead. Their goal is to evoke the pent-up rage and hatred simmering within and channel it toward the official enemy. It is not necessary for the demonization of the official enemy to be remotely believable, or stand up to any kind of serious scrutiny.

We witnessed it in the run-up the the invasion of Iraq where Saddam was depicted as the new-Hitler and now Russia-gate where Trump is depicted as Putin’s bitch.

Not that I’m surprised but nevertheless I’ve been completely dismayed by liberal reaction to the 2016 election, where they let the hatred of Donald Trump convert them into bloodthirsty cold warriors, as Max Blumenthal’s new book, The Management of Savagery, makes abundantly clear. The war on terror, which Trump questioned on the campaign trail, Blumenthal argues, led directly to the demonization of Russia. Trump’s anti-interventionist rhetoric, however disingenuous, triggered what Blumenthal calls “a wild hysteria” among the foreign policy elites. Trump called the invasion of Iraq a mistake, and he questioned the arming of Syrian jihadists and deployment of U.S. forces in Syria. He was critical of NATO. At the same time, he called for better relations with Russia.

“Joining with the dead-enders of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, who were desperate to deflect from their crushing loss, the mandarins of the national security state worked their media contacts to generate the narrative of Trump-Russia collusion,” Blumenthal writes. “Almost overnight, hundreds of thousands of liberals were showing up at postelection rallies with placards depicting Trump in Russian garb and surrounded by Soviet hammer-and-sickle symbols.”

What’s darkly amusing is that despite the contrasting tribal signals, Republicans and Democrats don’t differ very much. While they depict Republicans like Trump as the devil-incarnate, the Democrats are simply the other party of capital. For example, when in power the Democrats don’t offer any progressive programs, like retirement, affordable education, childcare, safety nets, green-energy, etc. When they do offer a healthcare plan, it’s a warmed over corporate boondoggle from the Heritage Foundation–Obamacare–with its legacy of falling life expectancy. Instead, both parties seem to believe in more or less the same things– markets as the solution to every problem, and a society that’s populated by greedy, self-interested, profit-maximizing consumers on the one side, and corporate managers on the other. And, of course, we know that corporations are people too, my friend.

The result is the functional equivalent of one-party rule.

And, this brings–ideological rigidity. Though, we might simply call it brainwashing, or propaganda.

Presently, the arrest of Julian Assange provides a window into the 2-Minute hate-fest that’s gripped both conservatives and liberals equally as a result of the pervasive propaganda.

Assange and Wikileaks is despised by conservatives for demonstrating the hollowness of American exceptionalism, with the leaking of the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists.

Assange and Wikileaks is loathed by liberals for exposing the sham of American democracy with the leaking of the way in which the DNC rigged the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders. #Resistance liberals also really, really hate Assange because they’ve bought into the narrative that he helped Russia “steal” the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton by hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails. That so many prominent American liberals are cheering this on is shameful. I believe that it’s rooted in their sense of betrayal over Wikileaks exposure of the machinations of the corrupt Democratic Party and their Wall Street favoured war-hawk, Hillary Clinton. None of what Wikileaks revealed was untrue, but they blame the failure of their deeply flawed candidate on it nonetheless.

It’s time to acknowledge that the bi-partisan propaganda that’s employed by our rulers is world-class. In response to criticism of George W. Bush’s misadventure in Iraq by Natalie Maines, conservatives destroyed their Dixie Chick albums. And, now with the Russia-gate cult-induced trance, liberals might as well shave their heads, put on robes and start handing out literature at the airport.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in propaganda | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Market Stalinism

Posted on April 11, 2019 by camelotkidd

 

I’ve come to believe that Friedrich von Hayek was projecting when he claimed that socialism would usher in The Road to Serfdom, when in reality the road to serfdom has been paved by 21st century capitalism as embodied and enacted by monopolies like Amazon and Facebook.

Neoliberal intellectuals like Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman argued that the market represents a superior solution to securing the individual citizen’s representation and participation in sociopolitical processes. Beginning with the Mont Pelerin Society, they increasingly questioned the role of the state as a collective decision-maker and social planner and elevated consumer sovereignty into the only norm according to which societal wellbeing could be measured. The market, not democracy was sacrosanct, which is why so many neoliberal economists supported at different moments in their career authoritarian or even fascist regimes. Preserving the marketplace was more important than preserving democracy.

Many theorists confuse neoliberalism with laissez faire, but neoliberals understand that the market utopia they desire requires state intervention. Early neoliberals like Hayek and Mises did not expect the neoliberal market order to just arise. They found it necessary to convince the population of the blessings of the neoliberal order, and they utilized the state as an indispensable and powerful tool in the attempt to create and safeguard this market based order.

Present day neoliberal capitalism has benefitted from the simultaneous withering of the state as it relates to you and I, along with increased coercive power of the state to enforce a market based order. The coercive power of the state (as long as they control the state), is because neoliberals (rightly) have always viewed democratic state power as a fundamental threat to the freedom of capital.

We can observe this dynamic with powerful monopolies, like Amazon, who are still dependent upon countries, states and politicians for everything from the exercise of coercive power over populations, to forced market activity, to military intervention, to maintaining the very trade treaties that stymie states’ popular sovereign powers. Not only has ideology become more obscene and the coercion more blatant, but the rule of monopolies like Amazon over our government has become both more coercive and more direct, as we’ve observed with the giant online retailers demanded subsidies in its search for a new headquarters.

The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher came up with an appropriate term for this phase of capitalist development. He called it: market Stalinism, where, “the idealized market was supposed to deliver friction free exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to qualification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy.”

While neoliberalism promised us a world of efficiency, plenty, opportunity, abundance, and, ultimately, freedom, it has instead delivered a proliferation of bureaucracy, shortage, stultification, scarcity, and coercion. Despite the decades of “free market” or “free enterprise” propaganda, the reality is that neoliberalism has only truly delivered freedom for the billionaire class that rules our country. For the rest of us, we have a rigged, monopoly dominated, surveillance focused, financialized crony-economy.

Looking around, it’s become obvious that rather than freedom, neoliberalism has been an excuse for a 40 year looting spree by a sociopathic elite, who are uninterested in ruling a country that is falling apart, in some places resembling nothing so much as the Third World shit-holes that our president disparages.

That many Americans are becoming dimly aware of their precarious existence only feeds into this ongoing legitimation crisis embodied by the teacher strikes and labor militancy that appear to be the first signs of a nascent revolt against this oppressive market Stalinism. Both of our establishment political parties and the transnational oligarchs who own and control them are scared to death of the social democracy and working class revolts now on the ascendant, which threaten to undo 40 years of punitive austerity for us and record riches for themselves.

Luckily, American history provides an inspiring account of heroic activists who stand up to a nexus of state and corporate monopoly power. I’m talking, of course, about the Boston Tea Party where on December 16, 1773, American patriots boarded tea ships belonging to the hated East India Company anchored in the harbour and dumped their tea cargo overboard. At the time, the East India Company was the most powerful monopoly in the world, empowered by the British government to help maintain its sprawling empire.

Sound familiar?

Update: Senator Elizabeth Warren recently made national headlines with her plans to break up tech giants Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple, making it one of her signature proposals as she campaigns for the presidency. The notion should resonate and echo in our political memory—Teddy Roosevelt made his name as the trust-buster, for going after the great monopolies of the early 20th century in the name of the public interest. Twenty-first-century populist economics in America continues to be adorned the century-old piece of political syntax, “break ’em up.”

Warren’s essential rationale is that these tech companies act as monopolies and need to be cut down in size in order to promote more competitive markets, via traditional antitrust instruments such as the Sherman Act.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in neofeudalism, neoliberals | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment