Won’t end well

Posted on February 16, 2018 by camelotkidd

 

Lately, I’ve detected a certain sense of malaise among my fellow citizens.

In my opinion, it’s long been apparent that this won’t end well.

Take the stock market, the indicator that our elite reliably depict as proof of the superiority of American capitalism. Wall Street’s panicked reaction to signs of wage growth shows just how weak the economy is — and how much it caters to the wealthy.

In fact, the stock market, despite commentators cheerful pronouncements about universal ownership, is an elite wealth creation machine that has little to do with the real economy that you and I inhabit. Going further, Wall Street’s recent ascendancy was based largely on decisions made by our unelected Federal Reserve overlords. To fight the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed drove interest rates to record-low levels and injected vast sums of money into the financial system, a process called quantitative easing (QE).

Essentially what happened, is that in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash, the wealthy and corporations and banks they control were bailed out while the majority of Americans were left to slowly twist in the wind.

Expanding our view from the stock market, things look much worse.

Life expectancy in the US has fallen for the second year in a row. This is alarming because life expectancy has risen for much of the past century in developed countries, including the US. The decline in US health relative to other countries, however, is not new; it has been unfolding for decades. With the Reagan years came a war on labor, the busting of unions and the war on our meager welfare state. All of these neoliberal “reforms” were consolidated in the Clinton years, as the Democratic party was turned into the other business party.

With household incomes under pressure, people used credit cards and mortgages to fund the semblance of a middle-class standard of living. The financial crisis busted that model apart. Household incomes are still under pressure, but money has been far less easy for the middle and lower ranks than it has been for the upper. Slow growth and popular rage are the result.

The US is also alone among wealthy nations when it comes to extreme poverty. That we tolerate this state of affairs is shameful. After all, in a country that possesses the resources that the US does, it’s obvious that this is a political choice.

Then, there’s the other maladies afflicting the US.

“Suicide is a perennial problem throughout the nation. The latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data shows the 2016 national age-adjusted suicide rate reached the highest level seen in decades.”

Not just suicide but murder. The US leads the world by a large margin when it come to enraged citizens taking a gun and mowing down their neighbors.

All of these factors points to a day of reckoning that is rapidly approaching. Perhaps the prevalence of school shootings is acting as the proverbial canary in the coal mine?

Don’t think that the elite have not noticed the way things are moving. In my own line of work I interact with the 1% on a regular basis. I can tell you that even though they are doing better that ever, there is a sense of discreet terror. It’s obvious when they discuss all the ways that they’re trying to replicating their own advantages in the education of their little darlings.

And, they’re taking steps to protect their wealth and privilege, working hand in hand with the US government to control the growing unrest. Indeed, many of the institutions and technologies that we take for granted in our high-tech world are dual use and can be turned upon us as a means of repression.

Take the internet, for example. Journalist Yasha Levine has written a book—Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, where he traces the history of the internet to US counterinsurgency programs.

“My research reveals a third historical strand in the creation of the early Internet—a strand that has all but disappeared from the history books. Here, the impetus was rooted not so much in the need to survive a nuclear attack but in the dark military arts of counterinsurgency and America’s fight against the perceived global spread of communism. In the 1960s, America was a global power overseeing an increasingly volatile world: conflicts and regional insurgencies against U.S.-allied governments from South America to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. These were not traditional wars that involved big armies but guerrilla campaigns and local rebellions, frequently fought in regions where Americans had little previous experience. Who were these people? Why were they rebelling? What could be done to stop them? In military circles, it was believed that these questions were of vital importance to America’s pacification efforts, and some argued that the only effective way to answer them was to develop and leverage computer-aided information technology.

The Internet came out of this effort: an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval.”

It’s a dark take, but I think our plutocratic owners are going to try to abscond with their loot and leave us to rot, while doing everything they can to protect themselves and their property.

Let them eat cake.

 

 

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Double Down

Posted on February 8, 2018 by camelotkidd

 

The neocons are relentless. When one of their plans fails, they simply double down.

Take their signature invasion of Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Of course, there were no weapons, but never mind. They got rid of Saddam and stood poised to remake Iraq into a free-market utopia. There was just one little problem. When Saddam was overthrown, and the Sunni/Bathist party he controlled turfed out of power, the winners were the Iraqi Shia and their sponsors, Iran.

Oops!

Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created a “Shia Crescent” ranging from Iran through Iraq to Syria onward to Lebanon, where the Shia militia–Hezbullah–had fought the Israeli Defense Force to a standstill in 2006.

This brings us to the elephant in the room–Israel. The neoconservatives are a small group of ideologues. Most are allied with Israel. Some are dual-citizens. Since the late 1970’s the neoconservatives have  created an ideology of American world hegemony, specifying that the chief goal of US foreign policy is to prevent the rise of any other power that could check US unilateralism. Since the neoconservatives control US foreign policy, this explains US hostility toward Russia and China, and the wars and regime-change operations aimed at governments in the Middle East regarded by Israel as obstacles to Israeli expansion. For two decades the US has been fighting wars for Israel in the Middle East. If all this sounds suspiciously like the Oded Yinon Plan, don’t worry your pretty little head, I’m sure it’s all a crazy coincidence.

The Israeli connection helps understand the recent neocon hostility towards Iran, Syria and Lebanon. Essentially, because the neocons failed to comprehend the political fallout of overthrowing Saddam; now Syria, Lebanon, then Iran must be attacked to eliminate the “Shia Crescent”. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s  groundbreaking 2007 article–The Redirection, explains how the neocons doubled down on a crazy scheme to work with Al Qaeda as way of striking Shia power across the Middle-East.

When the Arab Spring riots gave the neocons the pretext to foment regime change in Syria they seized the opportunity by funding, arming and training their Sunni terrorist proxies, in a genocidal civil war that still rages. Once dismissed as a baseless conspiracy theory, it is now a known and admitted fact that the US has been arming Al Qaeda terrorist factions in Syria to advance its ongoing regime change operations.

With the East Ghouta chemical weapons attack, blamed on Syrian President Bashar Assad, the neocons thought they had found the pretext to force President Obama to bomb Syria. However, when their planned bombing campaign was stymied in 2013 by Russia’s mediation and disposal of Syrian chemical weapons, the neocons doubled down and turned their sights to Ukraine, where they fomented a coup to punish Russia.

In my opinion, this is the essential backstory to Russia-gate.

When Trump, on the campaign trail, promised to reset relations with Russia the neocons doubled down with allegations of Trump’s collusion with Putin to force Trump into continued hostilities with Russia. Essentially, Trump was violating traditional policy of relying on force to overcome all obstacles or what Obama nicknamed “The Washington Playbook”

While the neocons are the gang that can’t shoot straight in their overseas adventures, at home their control of the political space is unmatched. Neocon foreign policies are US ones. Trump continues the trend.

The neocon record for destruction is impressive. Not only have their policies destroyed Ukraine, and destroyed Syria, and, before that, destroyed Libya, and destroyed Iraq, and destroyed Afghanistan, but they are always on the lookout for more countries to destroy. If you wonder why America is increasingly unpopular throughout the world, these neocon driven foreign policies are a good place to start.

No matter. Being a neocon means never being sorry, or suffering from your catastrophic mistakes.

Since there is no accountability for their fuck-ups, they continue their reign of destruction. In fact, they still haven’t given up their plan of regime change in Syria. If two fake chemical weapon attacks don’t do the trick, try a third with the added secret-sauce allegation that these chemical weapons will be soon aimed at the US. “A U.S. official says Syrian President Assad’s forces may be developing new types of chemical weapons, which could reach as far as the U.S.” 

Don’t laugh. Remember how the specter of Saddam’s chemical weapons crop dusters aimed at the American heartland helped drive the invasion of Iraq?

And, if the fake chemical weapons gambit fails, have your Al Qaeda terrorist proxies shoot down a Russian fighter with the MANPADS you supplied.

In the homeland, the neocons are doubling down on the Dr. Strangelove level crazy with the latest Nuclear Posture Review. It names Russia, along with China, North Korea and Iran, as potential threats and calls for an expansion of the US nuclear arsenal. It recommends the development of a range of new weapons that could be used in situations other than full-scale nuclear war, effectively undermining agreements to wind back nuclear arsenals. Indeed, the Trump administration has just announced that it is restructuring its nuclear weapons policy to take a more aggressive stance toward Russia than that which was held by the previous administration.

This plan to spend trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons is a direct threat to the American people. Not only will this plan greatly increase the likelihood of nuclear war but with all the challenges facing our country we need trillions of dollars of new nuclear weapons like we need a hole in our head.

The neocons have learned nothing from their past failures. They dream of restoring US power to what it once was and do not understand that this can no longer be done.

French diplomat Talleyrand had the best description of these types of people “They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

 

 

 

 

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An adversarial way

Posted on February 2, 2018 by camelotkidd

 

Legendary investigative journalist Robert Parry has died.

Anyone who’s read this blog knows how much I valued Robert and his investigative website–Consortiumnews.com.

His death is a profound tragedy, and I’ve spent the week in a state of persistent melancholy.

Life does go on.

First order of business is addressing the outrageous attack launched by PropOrNot following Parry’s death.

Let me be blunt. The attackers are cowardly neocon propagandists, bent on fomenting war with Russia. These trolls attacked Parry because he challenged the Russia-Gate narrative they spent the last year and a half promulgating. Parry’s other crime was providing well researched documentation of the machinations of the neocons and their military/industrial/complex partners in their mad crusade to maintain the US corporate empire.

In fact, during the Obama administration, Parry provided the best account of the sheer hubris of the neocons, and especially their fury at Russian interference in Syria, where they hoped to overthrow Syrian ruler–Bashar Assad. “There is a “little-old-lady-who-swallowed-the-fly” quality to neocon thinking. When one of their schemes goes bad, they simply move to a bigger, more dangerous scheme.”

Parry had a run in with PropOrNot before he died. In late 2016, about 200 websites, including Consortiumnews.com, were identified as “Russian propaganda outlets” by the anonymous website PropOrNot. As an article at Consortiumnews explained at the time, the Washington Post, (which, we should always remember is owned by Jeff Bezos, who through his company Amazon, provides cloud computing services for the CIA), granted PropOrNot anonymity to smear journalists who don’t march in lockstep with the Washington Consensus.

Journalist George Ellison, researched the people and institutions behind PropOrNot: Unpacking the Shadowy Outfit, and came to some startling conclusions. Read the article and examine the evidence yourself.

Anyway, enough with the trolls.

Let’s remember Robert Parry and his legacy. This amazing speech he gave back in 1993 encapsulates how he became such an adversarial journalist, and why it became impossible for him to remain in the corporate media.

Even though Parry’s is talking about the Reagan administration and their secretive, unlawful Central America policies, the same dynamic has applied in every presidential administration since. And, yes liberals, that includes Clinton and Obama.

“No one told me what to work on. And it struck me one day, as I was sitting around, that this administration had a thing about Central America. At the time there had been a number of atrocities that were occurring, and the four American churchwomen had been killed. And the explanations coming from this transition team were quite remarkable. If you remember, Jean Kirkpatrick suggested in one interview that these weren’t really nuns, they were more political activists, which always struck me as an amazing suggestion that it’s okay to kill political activists. Anyway, it seemed like a very important area to them, one that might end up driving much of what they did, at least in terms of foreign policy and national security issues.

So I began working on it. And that experience, in a way, shaped what I did for the rest of my time at the AP. And it was also striking to me that that experience was beyond anything I could have imagine, as an American citizen, watching. It was a case of wide- spread killing – political killing – of dissidents, torture, in the case of women often rape was involved; and this government was not just supporting it, not just providing the weapons and the military support, but trying to excuse it, rationalize it and essentially hide it.

Which is where I sort of came in and I think many people in the American press corps in Washington came in, and the press corp in Central America. At the time the press corps was still the Watergate press corp, if you will. We were fairly aggressive, we were not inclined to believe what we heard from the government, and sometimes we were probably obnoxious. But we were doing our jobs as I think, more or less, as they were supposed to be done. That is – to act, when necessary, in an adversarial way.

There was a pattern of deception from the very beginning. Even when there was something horrible happening in those countries. Even when hundreds, thousands of human beings were being taken out and killed, the role of the US. government became to hide it, to rationalize it, to pretend it wasn’t that serious, and to try to discredit anyone who said otherwise.

But the reality became the greatest threat, even at that stage, to what the new administration wanted to accomplish. So what we saw, even at that early stage, was the combat that was developing and the combat in terms of the domestic situation in Washington was how do you stop the press from telling that story. And much of what the Reagan administration developed were techniques to keep those kinds of stories out of the news media.”

Parry makes an important point about the self-censorship that shapes the corporate media.

“So the message was quite clearly made apparent to those of us working on this topic that when you tried to tell the American people what was happening, you put your career at risk, which may not seem like a lot to some people, but you know, reporters are like everybody else I guess – they have mortgages and families and so forth and they don’t really want to lose their jobs – I mean it’s not something they aspire to. And the idea of success is to keep one of these jobs and there are a lot of interesting perks that go with it, a certain amount of esteem, you know, as well as you get paid pretty well. Those jobs in Washington – you can often be making six figures at some of the major publications, so it’s not something you readily or easily throw away, from that working level.”

Parry was not a partisan reporter but I believe that he exemplified what our founders intended when they articulated the concept of a forth estate that would hold the other branches of government accountable. It was also quite apparent that he understood the risks of what he was doing, yet he kept at it.

“But what we began to see was something that was unusual I think even for Washington – certainly it was unusual in my experience – a very nasty, often ad hominem attack on the journalists who were not playing along.”

Parry was never sentimental about the challenges facing investigative journalism, but he was an optimist and he never stopped trying his best to tell the truth.

“I guess the challenge of the moment becomes is how that gets changed. How do the American people really get back control of this – not just their government, but of their history – because it’s really their history that has been taken away from them. I think it will take a tremendous commitment by the American people to insist on both more honest journalism, more straightforward journalism, but also maybe even new journalism.”

We lost a real American hero.

God bless you Robert Parry.

 

 

 

 

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Predatory Society

Posted on January 31, 2018 by camelotkidd

 

I’ve been writing recently about US foreign policy and the lack of interest among Americans with the horrific results of these policies. If we’re honest, (and I sincerely believe that this is why the disinterest), US foreign policy is largely about invading other countries or deploying terrorist proxies to overthrow their governments, and turning them into shitholes.

Speaking of Trump’s boorish statement. What is worse, turning nations into shitholes or calling them that? Where were all those concerned Americans when war was unleashed upon Syria, Libya, Iraq? Where were the media?

In my opinion, Americans don’t give a shit about the victims of these foreign policies because they’ve been conditioned not to give a shit about other Americans.

In a depressing, yet not surprising, article, journalist Umair Haque, depicts our country facing a profound moral collapse, and our neighbors, who’ve been caught on the wrong side of fate, living genuinely traumatic and desperate lives.

“In America, there is the catastrophic collapse of social bonds. Extreme capitalism has blown apart American society so totally that people cannot even care for one another as much as they do in places like Pakistan and Nigeria. Social bonds, relationships themselves, have become unaffordable luxuries, more so than even in poor countries: this is yet another social pathology unique to American collapse.”

The reason the US faces such a collapse is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has destroyed the social bond of American society and initiated a selfish morality, where savage competition is encouraged, everything is monetized, and nothing is stable or sacred. Going further, neoliberalism promotes sociopathic personalities by rewarding extreme greed and narcism.

Margaret Thatcher articulated the cruel ethos of neoliberalism when she stated that there is no society, only individuals.

She was wrong. We’re not just individuals, we’re social beings that require others to be fully human.

Tragically, our plutocratic owners and their technocratic managers have embraced Thatcher’s maxim.

Presently we’re experiencing the results of this vast open-air experiment.

In his article, Haque describes a series of strange and bizarre pathologies, unique to the US, that he says are caused by the effects of the despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

“America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough — but it is just a number. Perspective asks us for comparison. So let me put that another way. America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, the phenomenon of regular school shootings appears to be a unique feature of American collapse — it just doesn’t happen in any other country — and that is what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society.”

Haque argues that we’re all complicit in the collapse of American society.

“A predatory society doesn’t just mean oligarchs ripping people off financially. In a truer way, it means people nodding and smiling and going about their everyday business as their neighbours, friends, and colleagues die early deaths in shallow graves. The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich — but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about.”

Most Americans don’t even notice anymore because neoliberal values have enjoyed such an insidious process of normalization over the last 40 years. If anything, commentators want to blame it all on Trump, but these attitudes proceed him. Like I’ve said before–Trump is not the cause of our sickness, just the logical conclusion of years of neoliberal economic policies and neoconservative foreign policies.

Haque offers a warning to others who succumb to the siren call of neoliberalism.

“Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too. They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.”

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War is a way of shattering to pieces

Posted on January 25, 2018 by camelotkidd

 

Who knew Defense Secretary Mattis had such a refined sense of humor?

SEC. MATTIS:  “We don’t invade other countries, in Russia’s case — Georgia, Ukraine.  That we settle things by international rule of law, you know, this sort of thing… One point I want to make is we respect these as sovereign nations with a sovereign voice and sovereign decisions, and we don’t think anyone else should have a veto authority over their economic, their diplomatic or their security decisions. So one of the points I will be making just by being there is we respect these countries, and we respect their sovereignty, their sovereign decisions.”

Maybe Mattis has a medical marijuana card? It’s legal in D.C., after all.

If he does, I want to know what he’s smoking.

Here’s the thing–not only does the US not respect sovereignty, but our Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, recently announced our new foreign policy with respect to Syria, where the whole policy violates Syrian sovereignty. Tillerson spoke to the press on January 17: “The United States will maintain a military presence in Syria … Our military mission in Syria will remain conditions-based.”

Maybe the Secretaries of State and Defense ought to get together once and a while and discuss policy? Or, at least keep their stories straight?

Just a thought.

Any American with a working brain cell understands that the US violates other nations sovereignty–regularly.

Nevertheless, it’s extremely difficult to get Americans, liberal or conservative, to frankly discuss this obvious reality.

The Trump supporters who believed the president when he promised to pull back from regime change and foreign conflict in pursuit of empire should be pissed. It’s beyond obvious that the neocons have made Trump their bitch.

I know it sounds harsh, but what the fuck?

And, members of the McResistence, way to go! Your obsession with Russia-gate has greatly aided the neocon machinations. Again, good job.

Don’t forget the corporate media with their propagandistic 24-hour news cycle, and strategic deployment of the memory hole, with regards to statements like Mattis’s.

There’s a method to the madness.

The empire that the US maintains through perpetual war is key to the wealth and power that our plutocrat owners have amassed.

Since the Second World War the wealthy and the corporations they own have maintained  a permanent wartime economy in order to maximize profits. WWII provided these managers and captains of industry a very important lesson: during a war there is lots of money to be made.

In my opinion, it’s for this reason that the Cold War was unleashed in 1945, not by the Soviets but by the US military/industrial/complex, or as C. Wright Mills described them–the power elite.

While the profits generated by the Cold War were privatized to the advantage of the elite, its costs were largely socialized. Up until the 70’s this arrangement was bearable for the majority of Americans who were employed under this military/Keynsian arrangement, and protected from the savagery of the market with New Deal welfare programs. Over time, neoliberalism has taken away these benefits from average Americans. In fact, since 9/11 the war on terror with its precarious gig economy has been an unmitigated disaster for average Americans.

Trump was elected for articulating this grim reality.

No matter. War is obscenely profitable for the elite that control our country, and they have no intention of returning to a peacetime economy whether average Americans like it or not. And, with their control over the corporate media, maintaining a state of perpetual warfare is child’s play.

Rogue blogger Nina Illingworth explains how Americans are propagandized into supporting endless war, through an insidious public/private/partnership.

“The simple truth is that the rich warmongers who dominate the center establishment in US politics require little if any justification to start wars; no matter how disastrous the conflict, or how many lives it ends–politicians still get bribes, military contractors still get to bill taxpayers trillions of dollars to replace the bombs we rain down like hellfire and wealthy elites invested in the national security industry still get their yearly stock bonuses.

Furthermore, because the US corporate media is either dominated by the same interests who stand to profit from endless conflict, or is just happy to repeat propaganda the government offers to justify military action; manufacturing consent for virtually any war can be easily accomplished in a span of months not years.

It is important to note that in practice if not by design, this combination of the US administration’s need to control public opinion about foreign interventions, as well as mainstream media’s profit-driven imperative to attract viewers, effectively makes the government and major American news corporations partners in producing and packaging a given war for public consumption.”

I’m in awe of this all-American propaganda system. In 2002 and 2003 conservatives were whipped into a war frenzy in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and now, liberals have been converted into cold-warriors by Russia-gate, promulgated endlessly by liberal media stars like Rachel Maddow.

The upshot is that the neocons and Russia hawks on Capitol Hill have gotten the new cold war their military-industrial complex donors have so desperately craved, as have the oligarchs who own America’s mainstream media.

Trump hasn’t made America great again, but he has kept America perpetually at war.

George Orwell had something to say about this state of affairs.

 

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Duck and Cover

Posted on January 17, 2018 by camelotkidd

 

A year on it’s become clear that the McResistance to Trump’s misrule is largely about Democrats and liberals avoiding self-examination, while continuing the ruinous neoliberal and neoconservative policies that brought us to this point.

For example, Trump came into office promising to dial back tensions with Russia, while severely criticizing US regime-change policies. Now, thanks to the constant drum-beat of Russia-gate, led by erstwhile liberals like Rachel Maddow, Trump has turned out to be just like Obama, who turned out to be just like Bush. Apparently, it doesn’t matter much who sits in the White House or which political party controls Congress, the same political forces are dominant and the same neocon inspired foreign policy is implemented.

These dominant political forces, sometimes referred to as the deep state, have a vested interest in drumming up support for a new cold-war, while Trump’s campaign talk of defunding NATO, friendship with Russia, and leaving Syria to Assad has raised alarms among the neocons.

The problem for a neophyte like Trump, who doesn’t understand how Presidential power is wielded, is that he’s in over his head and doesn’t have a network of trustworthy foreign policy intellectuals to fall back upon in a crisis. Furthermore, his narcism makes him an easy mark for corporate media propaganda. It was no surprise that he received his best ratings when he lobbed cruise missiles at Syria.

Essentially, what we’ve seen with Trump’s recent bellicose actions constitute a series of clumsy attempts by Trump to appease the neocons because he realizes, correctly, that they form the core of the opposition to his presidency, and that they were the number-one enemy. He has tried to appease them with the result that they now control his foreign policy.

Rogue-blogger, Caitlin Johnstone, says. “The US power establishment is working to manufacture support for escalations with Russia for the same exact reason it has worked to manufacture support for escalations with all the other governments that it has bullied into submission over the years: to prevent the rise of any global power that could weaken the hegemony of the US plutocracy.

This is why America acts so goddamn crazy all the time, and it’s also one of the major obstacles to getting any kind of robust peace movement up and running in the US. The fact of the matter is that America is conducting a nonstop campaign to destabilize, manipulate, bully and control other nations to prevent the rise of a new rival superpower.”

We’re seeing the poisoned results of these crazed neoconservative foreign policies with the recent ICBM scare, where Haiwaian residents fled panic stricken into the streets, expecting their state to be turned into a nuclear fire-ball.

Luckily, Hawaii has Tulsi Gabbard. The courageous congresswoman has been one of the very few leaders to shine a light on the details of our deep state foreign policy, where the US was deploying Al Qaeda as their proxy to overthrow the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad. She even introduced HR 608, Stop Arming Terrorists, bill in Congress, in an effort to force the issue.

Gabbard appeared on multiple Sunday news shows a day after her state’s false ICBM emergency alert sent Hawaii into a tense 40 minutes of panic before it was revealed to be a message sent in error. She slammed the mainstream media’s reporting on the North Korean nuclear threat, saying, “We’ve got to understand that North Korea is holding onto these nuclear weapons because they think it is their only protection from the United States coming in and doing to them what the United States has done to so many countries throughout history.” 

Trump was always going to be a terrible president, but he did promise to change the crazy neoconservative foreign policies promulgated since 9/11. Now, thanks to the McResistance jumping on the deep state’s get-Trump movement, fucking liberals have made war with Russia probable and our world infinitely more dangerous.

Get ready for more of these ICBM scares.

Remember to duck and cover.

 

 

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Siver Lining

Posted on January 11, 2018 by camelotkidd

 

I like to read books twice. Not all books but certainly the good ones.

It’s amazing the things that you miss the first time.

Take Douglas Valentine’s–The CIA As Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World. It blew me away the first time I read it, but the second time was more fruitful. I realized that I’d missed one of Valentine’s most provocative points–That while the US might have lost the Vietnam War, the CIA’s Phoenix Program provided a silver lining by demonstrating how the US could control enemy populations during a conflict.

Subsequently, Phoenix changed how America fights its ongoing wars and how the public views this new type of political and psychological warfare, in which civilian casualties are an explicit objective.

Valentine has been researching the CIA for over 30 years and has interviewed over 100 CIA officers during that period. (Read the book to find out how he gained their confidence) What he learned about our country in the process is sobering.

“The ruling class within the National Security Establishment, represented most perfectly by Hillary Clinton, know that its enemies, foreign and domestic, must be suppressed ideologically as well as militarily. Thus they have embraced the Phoenix concept of employing implicit and explicit terror to control, organize and pacify societies. Phoenix was always understood as the silver lining in the Vietnam debacle. The aforementioned CIA officer, Warren Milberg, wrote a thesis in 1974 titled, “The Future Applicability of the Phoenix Program.” Many of the CIA and military officers I interviewed wrote similar papers extolling Phoenix.”

Phoenix holds the key to understanding US foreign policies. Like regime-change. Or, the deployment of Al Qaeda and Nazis as terrorists proxies. Or, the Salvador Option.

Not only foreign policies but domestic ones as well.

The creation of the Homeland Security Department in the wake of 9/11 was based on the Phoenix model, leading to the creation of  anti-terror strategies and tactics to use against the American people. The government has enacted administrative detention laws, which are the legal basis for Phoenix-style operations, so that civilians can be arrested on suspicion of being a threat to national security. Phoenix was a bureaucratic method of coordinating agencies involved in intelligence gathering with those conducting anti-terror operations, and the Department of Homeland Security has established fusion centers based on this model around the nation. Psychological operations against the American people have also proliferated since 9-11.

For instance, Jade Helm, the controversial military training exercise carried out in Texas, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Utah, was modeled after Phoenix, where military and local officials set up Phoenix-style coordination centers as a way of giving the military Special Operations and Civil Affairs units experience working together with local police forces in a realistic domestic counterinsurgency operation.

Valentine argues that: “Just as as Phoenix Intelligence Operations and Coordination Centers were established in every province and district in South Vietnam, the Department of Homeland Security has now established fusion centers, and the FBI has established Joint Terrorism Task Forces, to coordinate representatives from every police, security, military and civic organization in every state and major city.”

For most Americans the notion that our premier intelligence agency is akin to organized crime is rejected with prejudice.

Valentine acquired his initial inkling as a young man, thanks to his father, a WWII veteran who survived a Japanese POW camp.

“My father stepped into the street and I followed him. He stood behind the delivery truck. Wondering what the hell was going on, I watched while he threw open the doors. The guy who took down names and numbers was sitting in the front passenger seat beside the delivery truck driver; three village cops were sitting on boxes in the back of the truck. Cash and slips of paper were being exchanged.

“Take a good look”, my father said. “This is the true relationship between crime and law enforcement.”’

Valentine offers some good advice to make sense of a world where the cops work with criminals.

“Most people never make that rite of passage. The entire academic world is clueless, and most of the middle class as well. They think the cops are there to protect them, and if they’re white and keep their mouths shut and do what they’re told, the cops might make an effort, if there’s something in it for them. Otherwise they make sure that crime is properly organized, and that the rich and powerful are happy. To think of the cops otherwise is crazy.”

Valentine says that the corporate media is essential to the public’s positive perception of the CIA.

“The media prevents you from knowing how you’re being dominated, by keeping the CIA’s secrets. The media and the CIA are same thing. Any domestic Phoenix-style organization or operation depends on double-speak and deniability, as well as official secrecy and media self-censorship. The CIA’s overarching need for total control of information requires media complicity.”

The most salient thing about how the CIA is organized as a criminal conspiracy is the reason for it. And, no it’s not about intelligence gathering or keeping America safe from the bad guys.

It’s about the control the US elite maintain over our country and the world.

Valentine opens The CIA As Organized Crime, with a quotation from Johan Galtung that explains how the elite maintain this control.

“Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance, structural violence is the tool of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses guns; the professional uses social structure.”

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It’s all about the Benjamin’s

Posted on January 4, 2018 by camelotkidd

 

Ever wonder why the US regime-changes this country but not that country?

Wonder no more.

It’s all about the Benjamin’s.

The US maintains its hegemony thanks to the power of the US dollar—the worlds reserve currency–and the reality of the petrodollar, where countries that wish to purchase oil must purchase dollars first. The essence of the 1970’s deal following the oil-shock was that the US would agree to the defense of Saudi Arabia as well as arms sales in return for all oil trades being denominated in US dollars. 
“As a result of this agreement, the dollar then became the only medium in which energy exchange could be transacted. This underpinned its reserve currency status through the need for foreign governments to hold dollars; recirculated the dollar costs of oil back into the U.S. financial system and — crucially — made the dollar effectively convertible into barrels of oil. The dollar was moved from a gold standard onto a crude oil standard.”

 

The petrodollar has lasted for over 41 years, and has been the driving force behind America’s economic, political and military power.

Presently this arrangement is threatened by the move by Russia and China to create an alternative to the dollar.

This would subsequently allow Russia and Iran to both effectively mitigate US and UN sanctions by facilitating the establishment of an energy market completely apart from the US.

Understanding this reality puts the protests that have erupted in Iran, and the sudden US concern for human rights there in a completely different light.

Going further, the idea that the US is concerned about human rights is laughable.

I believe that America’s renewed desire to escalate military tensions – this time directed at Iran – is a front for America’s continual financial war against countries that fail to conform to the Washington Consensus.

Commentator Alastair Crooke lays out what’s at stake in a must read article.

“China, Russia and Iran share a common strategic interest to establish a currency zone, with the depth of markets and infrastructure, to operate independently of the dollar sphere.  These states have made it very clear that they are committed to a long-term strategy to stop using the US dollar, as their primary currency, in global trade.  

Trump’s Security Strategy – if prosecuted seriously – precisely risks an upset to the precarious balance to this ongoing, (and until now) slowly unfolding, financial war.  Pursuing aggressive financial sanctions against any of these three states risks now precipitating a premature triggering of substantive monetary change in retaliation (and, a concomitant risk of financial chaos).  It is possibly this latter outcome to which Herman Gref was hinting when he told the Financial Times that blocking international clearing for Russian banks would have such a devastating effect, that it would “make the Cold War look like child’s play”.

Crooked also explains how the US domestic economy became financialized along the way.

“The U.S. avoided high inflation by letting the dollar circulate globally. It also needs to restrain the printing of dollars to avoid a dollar devaluation. Then what should it do when it runs out of dollars? 

The Americans came up with a solution: issuing debt to bring the dollar back to the U.S. The Americans started to play a game of printing money with one hand and borrowing money with the other hand. Printing money can make money. Borrowing money can also make money. This financial economy (using money to make money) is much easier than the real (industry-based) economy. Why will it bother with manufacturing industries that have only low value-adding capabilities?

Since August 15, 1971, the U.S. has gradually stopped its real economy and moved into a virtual economy. It has become an “empty” economy state. Today’s U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has reached US$18 trillion, but only $5 trillion is from the real economy.

U.S. brings a large amount of dollars from overseas, back to the U.S.’s three big markets: the commodity market, the Treasury Bills market, and the stock market. The U.S. repeats this cycle to make money: printing money, exporting money overseas, and bringing money back. The U.S. has thus become a financial empire.”

However, the financial arrangement that undergirds US hegemony is precarious, as Crooke makes clear.

“The operational launch of the Chinese Yuan denominated oil futures option in time — depending how quickly contracts can be adjusted – holds the prospect for displacing the petro-dollar system, especially if Saudi Arabia agrees to sell crude to China in Yuan (perhaps as part of China buying a stake in the Aramco offering).” 

This article goes a long way towards explaining why our elite are freaking out about Russia and China, and why the US military is deployed world-wide in a never ending series of wars.

The financialization that the US elite have used to maintain worldwide hegemony has had disastrous consequences for the average American.

If one quarter of the American working population in the 1960s was in manufacturing and one tenth is now, and the lost employment went into low-paying services while the income went into finance, then no wonder there has been an increase in inequality. The part of the economy that was producing material wealth, and that supported the middle class, was ripped out and thrown away. The society became poorer, and with it most of its people, except the top 1%.

Once again, the surest way to understand policy is to follow the money.

Remember–It’s all about the Benjamin’s

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Permanent emergency in the liberal imagination

Posted on December 22, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

Over the weekend, Russia-gate took an even more surreal turn when former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was accused of being a Russian-stooge because she shared a table with Vladimir Putin and former General Michael Flynn in 2015 at an RT dinner celebrating their 10th anniversary.

Rogue-blogger Caitlin Johnstone asks the obvious questions. “How fucking stupid do you have to be to believe that a party which has out of necessity run a candidate every presidential election since 1996 only ran one in 2016 because of some kind of nefarious Kremlin plot, and how fucking stupid must your echo chamber be to have fostered such a belief? How fucking stupid do you have to be to believe that a candidate who received one percent of the popular vote (less than half of what Ralph Nader received in 2000) despite running against the two least popular mainstream candidates ever was only able to achieve this via Kremlin collusion? How fucking stupid do you have to be to never bother to research the perfectly reasonable explanation that Jill Stein has given for the picture in question?”

Here’s one of the tweets to demonstrate just how far down the rabbit-hole the Russia-gaters have gone.

Louis Savedow@LSavedow
Replying to @LSavedow @Greg_Palast

Here is the photo of the infamous dinner where Flynn began to coordinate on behalf of trump with Putin in Russia and was paid to be there. Question – why is Jill Stein here? She has never given a reasonable answer.
She was paid to run as part of their conspiracy.

FILE- In this file photo taken on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin, center right, with retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, center left, and Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, obscured second right, attend an exhibition marking the 10th anniversary of RT (Russia Today) 24-hour English-language TV news channel in Moscow, Russia. The Kremlin said Monday Dec. 4, 2017 that conversations between the Trump administration and the Russian ambassador to the United States could not have possibly swayed Putin's decision on U.S. sanctions imposed by the outgoing administration. (Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, file)

And another from someone in the “Resistance”, (who’s obviously off her meds).

Go away Dr. Jill Stein. Traitor?! You sat at PUTIN’s table w Mike Flynn. Were you part of Putin’s attack against our 2016 election? Later you took $ from kids in fake recount promises. Return $ to them! , Beware of Jill – friend of Putin.

Yesterday, Russia-gate got local, when the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story entitled–Ex-SLC mayor found a seat at Russian dinner. Rocky Anderson, our radical ex-mayor who famously protested President George W. Bush when he came to SLC, was at the 10th anniversary RT gala as well. While not at the same table as Putin, he was in the company of “noted communist” Peter Kusnik, who with director Oliver Stone made the controversial documentary–The Untold History of the US, (probably at Putin’s express direction).

If all this sounds like an episode of South Park, you’re not alone.

History professor Jackson Lears recaps the sheer idiocy of Russia-gate in the London Review of Books—What We Don’t Talk about when We Talk about Russian Hacking.

“A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.

The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind.”

In my opinion Russia-gate is less about Russian meddling in our sacred elections than with the Democratic party using the constant drumbeat of charges and accusations as a means to avoid addressing the issues that average Americans care about. The Russia-gate scandal has been driven by the well-educated professionals that writer Thomas Frank castigates in his latest–Listen Liberal. For example–last summer, according to the Washington political journal The Hill:

Frustrated Democrats hoping to elevate their election fortunes have a resounding message for party leaders: Stop talking so much about Russia. … Rank-and-file Democrats say the Russia-Trump narrative is simply a non-issue with district voters, who are much more worried about bread-and-butter economic concerns like jobs, wages and the cost of education and healthcare.

Russia-gate is also about the corporate media freaking out about their loss of credibility and respect. If you look around you’ll notice that there are a myriad of corporate media stories that have one thing in common–they all paint anti-establishment speakers, writers, film-makers and even comedians as “Russian propagandists” simply because they advance opinions that run counter to US establishment interests.

George Orwell would surely appreciate this moment or two.

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The Trump Diversion

Posted on December 14, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

Many liberals would love to depose Trump and return to a normalcy where such a monster could never be elected. If only Hillary would’ve won, the thinking goes, things would have been so much better.

I beg to disagree.

As a radical writer, I believe we face a generational crisis due to decades of elite mismanagement.

In this way, Trump is the perfect president for this milieu. He’s a tawdry, reality-TV pitch-man, putting a monster face on all that is fucked-up in America. Because Trump is from the same class, he’s also a living, breathing embodiment of the plutocracy that has looted the country under the rubric of neoliberalism.

In the Political Economy of Obama/Trump, Richard Wolff, argues that US capitalism, under the thrall of neoliberalism, has brought about the generational crisis due to its inability to manage the economy for most Americans.

“When the second major crash in 75 years hit in 2008, it exposed the debt-dependent reality of those decades. It also sent capitalism careening through a new depression followed by a devastating austerity regime. The economic careening provokes the political: its establishment center cannot hold.

Among leading capitalist circles there was immediate fear that the 2008 crash might well revive the 1930s’ coalition of labor unions (CIO), socialist and communist parties that forced the New Deal from below. True, the sustained post-1945 persecutions of communists and socialists plus the persistent attacks on labor unions had destroyed the New Deal coalition, but no one could be certain that it might not rematerialize from a new generation. What could and did help to prevent that was inserting Barack Obama into the presidency. He was the quintessential liberal, urbane, counterpoint to the Bush-led GOP that presided over the Crash’s arrival. Hillary Clinton might have done the job but Bill Clinton’s enthusiastic embrace of all that had crashed in 2008 gave the job instead to Obama.

And Obama performed as needed. Strictly trickle-down economics was how his administration “handled” the 2008-09 crisis. Nothing remotely like the New Deal’s taxing the rich to fund programs for the poor and middle was proposed or debated, let alone adopted as policy. Roosevelt in the 1930s had created and filled many millions of federal jobs. Yet the deep unemployment problem of 2008-09 prompted no serious consideration or even discussion of a federal jobs program from the White House or congressional leaderships.

Obama in the White House could temporarily calm and deflect mounting anger and resentment. His words and symbolic gestures effectively blocked many labor unions, students, white liberals and African-Americans from mobilizing against his administration’s economic policies. And when real opposition did arise in 2011, he suppressed it (as with the nationally coordinated forced removals of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s municipal encampments).

However, the powers that be paid a heavy price for the social quiet they purchased with Obama’s presidency. Sections of the white working class plus broad swaths of right-wing and conservative populations recoiled from the Obama administration. The 2008 crash had hurt them too. The trickle down recovery likewise largely bypassed them. Badly needing help, they resented “others” who seemed to have captured the government and would use it exclusively to help themselves. Indeed, those “others” included people they had long feared and/or hated: major parts of old party establishments coalescing with non-whites and “liberals.”

US capitalism used up the Obama diversion to get through most of the first decade after the 2008 crash. 

It is fast using up the Trump diversion. The social groups kept from system critique by Obama have become noticeably more interested in it since he departed the White House. Trump only accelerates that process. Meanwhile, Trump’s followers keep waiting for the promised protection from decline, but it does not appear. They get lots of symbolism but little substance. He and they blame their usual others, but their frustrations may soon open them too to system critiques.

Meanwhile, those critiques proliferate and mature across the society.”

In a perverse manner, Trump just by being Trump, might help shine a light on the  catastrophic failures of neoliberal/capitalism and our corrupt political and economic elite who’ve made his presidency possible and a generational crisis absolutely certain.

After that, it’s up to us.

Update: I’m in good company.

“…we dodged a bullet with Trump because he is incompetent. A competent right-wing ideologue who actually made the economy better (and it can be done), can change the US and own it–in a perverse reversal of FDR.

It is not enough to be for civility and decorum. Democrats must also truly be against Republican policies and for positive policies of their own which are radical enough to turn the United States away from its current economic trajectory towards further and further oligarchy. Policies which create and spread wealth, and which end monopolies and oligopolies, and break corruption.

These policies are well known and understood: high marginal tax rates, breaking up large companies and real universal health care, along with effective stimulus and investment. What is lacking isn’t knowledge of how to implement them, what is lacking is will: The Democrats don’t want such policies any more than Republicans do. What they want is kinder, gentler neoliberalism. A slow descent into oligarchy, with a few more cushions for the homeless.”

 

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