The Axis of Stupid

Posted on September 21, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

Between Trump’s UN speech and the new Committee to Investigate Russia, I don’t know who’s dumber–Trump, or the disparate faction that seems determined to take him down.

The Committee to Investigate Russia is sponsored by Hollywood director Rob Reiner, who played Meathead, on the 70’s sitcom–All in the Family.

I know, sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

Reiner explained the purpose as–“We’re trying to break through and explain to people why this is important and that there is a serious problem here that people don’t seem to really grasp.”

Maybe the purpose of the new committee is to propagandize Americans who seem to have lost interest in the story?

Recent polls have demonstrated that the American electorate could care less about it. As they continue to lose their jobs and homes and fall into medical debt and struggle with opioid addictions, they want our leaders and the corporate media to focus on important things like the economy and the fact that they face an increasingly precarious future.

While average Americans are tired of the story, liberal intellectuals, whose hatred of Trump seems to have overpowered their cognitive facilities, have embraced the Russia hacking story with a fervor. (I’m looking at you–New York Times) The last time this happened in 2003, after a year of such propaganda, the U.S. attacked Iraq on fraudulent – not “mistaken” – intelligence.

Perhaps the new effort by the Committee to Investigate Russia is due to the fact that the Russians have successfully deterred the US’s regime change foreign policies in Syria and Ukraine?

Most Americans never heard his speech, but at the UN General Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin described American foreign policies thusly–“An aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions and the lifestyle itself. Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster. Nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life. I cannot help asking those who have caused the situation, do you realize now what you’ve done?”

Putin was referring to the US efforts to overthrow the Syrian regime by employing al-Qaeda as proxies. The entirely legal military intervention by Russia at the request of the sovereign government of Syria — a member in good standing at the UN – reversed the nation’s descent into U.S.-backed jihadist terror. History may decree that Putin saved the international legal order from complete destruction by the US.

This effort to blame Russia for hacking our precious democracy has been ongoing since before the presidential election, but it became super-charged in the wake of Trump’s win when Hillary Clinton needed an excuse for losing to an orange-haired freak.

Despite the Sturm und Drang many knowledgable independent journalist and insiders doubt the story. For example, U.S. intelligence veterans–ex-NSA official William Binney, and ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern–are skeptical that Russia “hacked” the DNC’s computers, pointing instead to a download of emails by an insider.

The Committee to Investigate Russia did receive lots of corporate media attention. Not only has the corporate media been pushing the hacking story relentlessly but now it involves one of their favorite Beltway tropes–bi-partisanship. Reiner is a Democrat, while Frum, Boot, and Clapper are neoconservative Republicans.

David Frum, if you’ll remember from the way-back-machine, was George W. Bush’s speechwriter, who is credited with inventing the expression “axis of evil“, which Bush introduced in his 2002 State of the Union address.

Frum is on to his new gig as part of an axis of stupid, where instead of actual Russian experts the committee is made up of the following leading lights:

  • a neocon blogger
  • a perjurer
  • wonk with no Russia background
  • the director of When Harry Met Sally, and Meathead
  • right-wing talk radio guy

Like I say–you can’t make this shit up.

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Race and Class

Posted on September 18, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

How, in a nation based on slavery and genocide, did a black man like Obama get elected president?

That’s the question I’m left with after reading Ta-Nehisi-Coates masterful essay on race entitled–The First White President.

Coates central assertion is that the foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the repudiation of Barack Obama’s legacy. He goes on to assemble a powerful argument that, contrary to many post election class-based analysis, race was the central factor that led to the election of Trump.

There is much that is true in Coates essay about the pernicious role that race plays in America.

However, the whole race/class thing in America is incredibly complicated, and trying to understand where one ends and the other begins seems to be a fools errand.

Let’s say that both contributed to the election of Trump.

I’m more interested in who is allowed to be president by the elite that control our country, and what they are expected to do once in office.

In my opinion, after the colossal fuck-up of the privileged, white Bush and his administration of arrogant neoconservatives, our elite needed something totally different. The misadventures in the Middle-East, followed by the Wall Street crash had deeply discredited the traditional powers that be.

Enter Obama, who was elected at this critical junction of American history.

Since the early 1970s corporate elites have abandoned the postwar class compromise and sought to radically restrict the scope of economic fairness. Essentially, what capitalists grudgingly accepted during an exceptional period of postwar growth and rising profits, they would no longer.

The past forty years have witnessed an ideological and political war against the labor movements and the welfare state they helped build. This bipartisan class-war advocated for the tenets of neoliberalism: deregulating the economy, decreasing progressive taxation; decreasing the scope of public goods; and decreasing the power of organized labor.

Obama’s mission, which he gladly signed up for, was to maintain this neoliberal status quo. He continued the foreign policies of Bush, while bailing out the bankers who caused the crash, leaving millions of American homeowners impoverished in the process. Indeed, the whole thrust of policy by the entire political class, Obama included, was devoted to preserving the financial sector. Obama’s real skill was to co-opt left-wing policies and maintain the power of the elite political and economic class that rules America.

Coates wants to blame persistent racism and the obstructionist Republicans who simply wouldn’t work with a black president, but this seriously distorts the historical record. We know from Ron Suskind’s, book–Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, that Obama, having ridden into office partly on a wave of popular anger at Wall Street and the bankers, called a meeting of the nations top 13 financial executives in March of 2009. Instead of siding with those who’d been most harmed by the crisis–workers, minorities, and the poor–Obama sided unequivocally with the bankers.

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” Obama said. “You guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem. And I want to help…I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you…I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger.” For the banking elite, who had destroyed untold millions of jobs, there was, as Suskind puts it, “Nothing to worry about. Whereas FDR had, during the Great Depression, pushed for tough, viciously opposed reforms of Wall Street and famously said “I welcome their hate”, Obama was asking “How can I help?” As one leading banker told Suskind, “The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.”

The real tragedy of Barak Obama is that he had the opportunity to be a transformational president, and advance race relations on a monumental scale. Imagine how Americans of all races, minus the 1%, of course, would have viewed him had he taken on Wall Street and advanced economic policies that began to reverse the inequalities brought on by 40 years of neoliberalism. Imagine if he would have put forth Medicare-for-All, healthcare reform  instead of the neoliberal Affordable-Care-Act.

But, that was always out of the question for Obama. His values are that of meritocracy. He saw people like Jaimie Dimon not as criminals who’d wrecked the country but as the smartest guys in the room that he went to Harvard with and socialized alongside.

Update: This sums up our recent presidential succession perfectly.

“America was spoonfed a boatload of lies in order to force the election of what the US oligarchs perceived as a more reliable pro-establishment candidate to protect their assets. Anyone who’s looking at the situation clearly can see that Trump isn’t extremely awful because of the few ways he’s differed from other recent presidents, he’s extremely awful because of the things he’s got in common with them. By far the most evil things that he has done haven’t been new horrors unique to his administration, but continuations of Bush and Obama’s neoconservative civilian-slaughtering foreign policy, oppressive neoliberal domestic policy, and Orwellian surveillance policy. After all the fearmongering and freakouts, we’ve seen conclusively that Trump is essentially a Republican Obama, who was himself essentially a Democratic George W. Bush. If anything, Trump is just more personally obnoxious about doing the things his predecessors did.”

 

 

 

 

 

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5 feet high and rising

Posted on August 30, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

Much of the Sturm und Drang over President Trump has got to do with the ongoing crisis in the legitimacy of the neoliberal dispensation. Let’s face it, our elite have made a hash of things and they can’t seem to cope with the cascading failures.

Just to add insult to injury, Hurricane Harvey has submerged their neoliberal ethos under 5 feet of fetid water.

Neoliberal hero Margaret Thatcher righteously proclaimed that– “…there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” While, Ronald Reagan denounced government in no uncertain terms, saying–“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help …”

If it wasn’t so tragic it would be quite hilarious to point and snicker at their cognitive dissonance as neoliberals attempt to obscure their cold and uncaring world-view behind lofty rhetoric of concern for the survivors of the massive storm.

As always, they will be aided by the corporate media, who will cynically use images of flooding and stories of heroic rescue to sell their favored narrative of disaster capitalism.

The real action will happen in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Neoliberals operate according to the maxim that–“you never let a serious crisis go to waste.”  After Hurricane Katrina, neoliberals rushed into New Orleans and began privatizing public schools and constructing new charter schools, while firing unionized teachers. Public housing was bulldozed with new upscale condos springing up in their place as working-class people who’d lived in New Orleans for generations were pushed out to make room for hip new professionals.

Naomi Klein describes this process in her book The Shock Doctrine, calling the erasure of the New Orleans public school system an educational land grab.

“In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid was brought back online, the auctioning off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision. Within nineteen months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.”

I’m certain that neoliberals are already plotting the reforms they’ll make in Houston when the waters recede.

 

 

 

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I don’t miss W.

Posted on August 19, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, I saw a bumper sticker on a car that said: I Miss W. The car was festooned with other stickers that led me to believe that the owner was a liberal.

Oh, great, another liberal who mistakes Trump for the cause of our disease when he’s just  one of the more ghastly symptoms.

In my opinion, we have a buffoon like Trump as President precisely because we never held W. and all the neoconservative minions who made up his administration responsible for the war crimes and torture they committed.

We also have a buffoon for a President because Obama and his neoliberal minions bailed out the bankers who were responsible for the Wall Street crash instead of the millions of Americans who were thrown out of their houses.

Indeed, the neoconservatives and the neoliberals of the last two administrations have demonstrated not only their intellectual bankruptcy, but their raw savagery.

For example, in the wake of Charlottesville, the entire political class is united in decrying neo-Nazis, but under Obama, the neoconservatives, led by Victoria Nuland, used neo-Nazi’s as stormtroopers to overthrow the Ukraine government and wage a savage civil war, all in an epic campaign to jump-start a second Cold War against Russia.

It should be obvious but crimes committed on the periphery of the empire always return to sender.

Then there’s the economic system-neoliberalism-that’s impoverished the vast majority of Americans while enriching the 1% and their professional hangers-on. Although, I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

In the Supermanagerial Reich, Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe examine the political/economy of Germany under Hitler and the Nazis and connect the violence of Charlottesville with neoliberalism.

“The parallel between the Nazi “revolution” in the 1930s and the neoliberal “revolution” in the 1980s and ’90s goes much further. The Nazis were also pioneers in what was then the uncharted economic waters of “privatization.” In the face of the Great Depression, states across the world — including the Social Democratic led Weimar Republic — nationalized key industries and, in some cases, like Germany, nearly the entirety of the financial sector. The Nazis — despite early propaganda indicating otherwise — were the unique exception. Not only did they avoid further nationalization but they innovated a process so idiosyncratic at the time that it required coining a German neologism: Reprivatisierung.”

Much of the problems we face as a country can be traced to these economic policies pursued by both political parties. We wonder why Americans are turning to violence or opioids, when it should be obvious that neoliberalism has created a vast underclass of precarious Americans.

Unfortunately, neoliberalism has come to regiment our lives to a startling degree with the idea that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity. Neoliberalism, despite misperceptions, doesn’t actually seek to abolish the state and create an organic market. Rather, it captures and transforms the state by reducing its power to regulate the wealthy and corporations they control, while radically expanding its co-ersive powers over American citizens.

In the process we’ve created our very own all-American, Supermanagerial Reich.

“While there is much gnashing of teeth over our own, cartoonish Hitler wannabe, too many political actors seem more than willing to turn their heads away from our own Supermanagerial Reich. Like mid-1930s Germans, too many are quite simply comfortable with the rolling slow-motion horror that has been neoliberalism. They view the Trumps and the Le Pens and the Erdoğans, and so forth as a new crisis, a sudden shock to the system. Many in the United States fear a Trump election because there might be an explosion of state repression against the vulnerable, particularly against specific racial and ethnic minorities. And yet, the neoliberal state has already created a penal system to rival the world’s most authoritarian dictatorships. The United States imprisons more citizens (total and per capita) than any other country on Earth, and African Americans and Latinos at a vastly over-represented rate. Many fear Trump would bring massive deportations of undocumented immigrants. And yet, the neoliberal state already engages in mass deportations, at the level of millions during the current administration, with countless more waiting in dire conditions in the world’s largest network of immigrant detention camps. Many fear a Trump election would bring mass persecution, surveillance, and restrictions for American Muslims. And yet, the neoliberal state already spies on Muslims, administers religious tests at borders, and polices Muslims for nothing more than their religious practices. Many fear a Trump election might bring economic ruin, and yet, for most Americans, wealth is vanishing, wages stagnant, real unemployment steady.”

As political philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, noted–“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Presently, we are living through a variety of morbid symptoms.

Update: As someone who grew up in the south, with many southern relatives and friends, I sympathize with the idea of the Lost Cause, that animates many of these folks, while accepting the reality that the Confederates rebelled against the Union as a way to preserve slavery.

The US history of slavery is incredibly complicated and ultimately tragic. Many northerners, especially the ship owners and bankers, created vast fortunes from the slave trade. Our hero’s, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners. To be perfectly honest, our country was founded on slavery and genocide. If you want to discuss this history it’s well past time.

That being said, while I respect the freedom of speech of even the most loathsome neo-Nazis, showing up heavily armed with assault weapons  is hardly freedom of speech. As a thought experiment imagine the response from the NYPD if Occupy Wall Street activists had brandished weapons.

 

 

 

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Pipeline-Istan

Posted on August 9, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

The Russian sanctions bill has got to be one of the most perverse pieces of legislation that I’ve ever seen.

Since WWII the presidency has increased its power vis-a-vis congress in relation to foreign policy and the ability to declare war, resulting in the imperial presidency that most of us have grown up with. One of the overlooked positives of the Trump presidency is that through his sheer ineptness he’s diminishing these imperial powers. However, Trump  called for better relations with Russia, resulting in a  bi-partisan attack led by the neoconservatives in both parties.

With the sanctions congress is effectively taking back its war powers to stop Trump from making peace with Russia.

What’s even more darkly amusing is that the sanctions are based on Russian meddling in our precious democracy, when recent studies have confirmed that the US is officially a plutocracy.

Maybe they should meddle.

That the sanctions passed both chambers of congress so overwhelmingly got me thinking that maybe the sanctions are about something else?

Perhaps they’re related to the wellspring of US foreign policy–oil and gas?

Asian Times, reporter Pepe Escobar coined the phrase Pipeline-Istan, to describe the New-Great-Game, a struggle for control over the oil and natural gas resources that are critical to our industrial world. Escobar says that nothing of significance happen with US foreign policy without an energy angle.

In a new article, Escobar argues that the new sanctions are all about the  energy wars against Russia.

“Even without considering the stellar historical record of Washington not only meddling but bombing and regime-changing vast swathes of the planet — from Iraq and Libya to the current threats against Iran, Venezuela and North Korea — the Russia-gate hysteria about meddling in the 2016 US presidential election is a non-story, by now thoroughly debunked.

The heart of the matter is, once again, energy wars.”

Escobar says that by imposing such harsh sanctions congress is also declaring economic war against Europe, especially Germany.

“According to a Middle East-based US energy source not hostage to the Beltway consensus, “the message in these sanctions is the EU has no future unless it buys US natural gas to cut out Russia. To deny Russia the natural gas market of the EU was the goal behind the just lost war in Syria to put the Qatar-Saudi Arabia-Syria-Turkey-EU pipeline in and the opening to Iran for an Iran-Iraq-Syria-Turkey-EU pipeline. None of these plans worked.

The source adds as evidence the 2014 oil price war against Russia, orchestrated by “the dumping of Gulf States’ surplus oil or reserve capacity on the world market. Since this has failed to bring Russia to its knees, the destruction of the Russian natural gas market in the EU has become a national priority for the United States.”

Escobar has been following the energy wars that constitute the New-Great-Game since the 1990’s when President Clinton, with the advice of Zbignew Bresinski, plotted the initial moves. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, control of the energy-rich former Soviet republics in the region was quickly seen as essential to future U.S. global power. It would be there, as the neocons imagined it, that the War on Terror would intersect with control over energy flows in a way that would allow the US to remain the dominant hegemon.

You’d never know any of this from reading the Washington Post or New York Times, where they describe US foreign policies as a never ending crusade to spread democracy and establish order in a chaotic world. If they criticize US foreign policy it’s–mistakes were made but the goals were noble.

Escobar asks the questions that our media dare not, and then connects the dots.

“How could Russia not interpret the war in Kosovo, then the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously tried to pair with the Taliban and encourage the building of another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), followed by the invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil reserves), and finally the recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy transportation junction) as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan? Though seldom imagined this way in our mainstream media, the Russian and Chinese leaderships saw a stark “continuity” of policy stretching from Bill Clinton’s humanitarian imperialism to Bush’s Global War on Terror.”

Many educated Americans dismiss this type of analysis. They point out that the US doesn’t need to go to all the trouble to get oil and gas when we can buy it cheaply on the open market, and now with fracking technology we have our very own American sources. But that misses the point. It’s not about access, but control of energy flows.

US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has been about controlling energy flows and making sure Russia is cut out.

If you want to understand what it is that the US does in the world–follow the pipelines.

 

 

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Cold War Kids

Posted on July 26, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

The Democratic Party with the corporate media in tow has been consistently promulgating the idea that Russia meddled in the 2016 election in favor of Trump. This effort is part of a larger scheme. Even before the election powerful factions within the US were agitating for a new Cold War against Russia.

And now Congress is getting into the act, with the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passing a bill giving Congress the power to block any effort by the White House to weaken sanctions on Russia, following the lead of the Senate that passed a sanctions bill 97-3.

A New York Times interview with Noam Chomsky provided a small sample of just how unhinged our discourse has become.

“For liberal opinion, the political crime of the century, as it is sometimes called, is Russian interference in American elections. The effects of the crime are undetectable, unlike the massive effects of interference by corporate power and private wealth, not considered a crime but the normal workings of democracy. That’s even putting aside the record of U.S. ‘interference’ in foreign elections, Russia included; the word ‘interference’ in quotes because it is so laughably inadequate, as anyone with the slightest familiarity with recent history must be aware.”

There is a method to the madness of a new Cold War.

The ideology of the US ruling class–the cold war kids— mandates endless conflict with Russia, and is seen as essential to the US grand strategy of empire. The stability of the NATO alliance, and the entire U.S. strategy of permanently subordinating Europe to its rule, is founded on the New Cold War with Russia.

Then there’s the MIC, Military/Industrial/Complex, that rakes in billions from the sale of advanced weapons systems that would be threatened by Trump’s intention to normalize relations with Russia.

The overweening power of finance and Wall Street over the US economy and their corresponding need to maintain the US dollar as the worlds reserve currency, also mandates US global primacy, which increasingly relies on raw military power to get its way.

The permanent war party that controls Washington D.C. may not be good at fighting and winning wars but since Vietnam has become superbly talented at coopting liberal critics by describing these conflicts as “liberal interventions.” President Trump has made their job easier. Now, with the ongoing investigation into Russian interference, erstwhile liberals, who used to look askance at the MIC and the deep state intelligence agencies, excitedly point to these institutions as validation that Trump should be deposed.

The rest of the country doesn’t seem to agree. A Harvard-Harris survey poll conducted last month shows that majorities in both major parties are saying “enough with Russia.”  They want Congress to drop the Russia madness and get progressive things done on healthcare, the economy and jobs. Almost three out of four respondents to the Harvard-Harris poll said that lawmakers aren’t focusing on the issues that matter most to them. More than two-third of Democrats (68 percent) say that. Sixty-two percent of voters say there is “no hard evidence” that Trump has colluded with Russia.  Sixty-four percent say the investigations are “hurting the country.”

The first Cold War did immeasurable damage to American values. From the McCarthy witch hunts and charges of sedition leveled against labor unions, to support for murderous right-wing juntas as a bulwark against indigenous nationalism that US planners depicted as a world-wide communist revolution, the US tarnished itself and its ideals.

With all of our domestic problems, including “the massive effects of interference by corporate power and private wealth,” the last thing we need is another Cold War.

Update: This describes the cold war kids to a t.

“A problem arises when almost all experts and politicians participating in these Washington based think tanks come from federal agencies or industries tied to the military through contracts worth billions of dollars. Hardly offering any dissent from official or mainstream opinions on issue ranging from Russia to the F-35, politicians, experts and journalists all agree that Russia constitutes the main danger and that the F-35 program does not have any critical issues and is actually a superior weapon, two lies in full swing. Think-tanks and their guests promote an erroneous narrative that seeds, nourishes and sustains the problems and inefficiencies that beset military systems and Washington’s strategic vision. They offer no criticism, no change of policy, only echo chambers of lies and propaganda.”

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Pitchforks

Posted on July 20, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

Since the election results came in the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party along with the corporate media have been in full cry over Russia’s supposed interference.

Nick Hanauer, a Seattle-based entrepreneur, has a better explanation of why we ended up with Trump. “The pitchforks are coming, my friends, and whether they come in the angry hands of a desperate mob or the tiny hands of an angry dictator, they’re coming for us. You may not want to believe that your great fortune has come, at least in part, at the expense of others, but the American people believe it. And they’re righteously pissed. So, you have a choice: You can either act now to help close the vast economic divide that is tearing our republic apart—or you can follow Trump’s rhetorical lead and start building huge f*cking walls. The pitchforks are at the gate, and time is running short.”

Hanauer, who I’m going to quote at length, makes a familiar argument to yours truly– economic insecurity does strange things to a society.

“Many smug, wealthy, highly educated liberals like myself (and let’s be honest, like many of you who have been blowing up my phone since the election) have taken to soothing ourselves with the notion that Trump was elected by stupid, racist people. And to some degree, this may be true. But like it or not, in America, even stupid racists have an equal claim to the prosperity, dignity, status and happiness that we urban economic elites hold so dear. Also, they vote. So while we should never pander to their racism, we must face the fact that if our greed prevents them from having their fair shot at happiness, they will most certainly take it from us by force. Parenthetically, I want to make clear that I am not so naïve as to believe that prosperity eliminates racism. It does not. But, it is one hell of a distraction. People who are thriving and hopeful may still be filled with hate, but they don’t have nearly as much reason to act on it.”

Hanauer proceeds to demolish the conventional explanation for the massive inequality in America.

“Many of my peers prefer to hide behind the enduring myth that today’s crisis of economic inequality and insecurity is the result of forces unleashed by unstoppable trends in technology and globalization. “It’s not my fault I have so much while others have so little,” we comfort ourselves, “it’s the economy.” That is nonsense. There’s no intrinsic reason why the social and political changes delivered by technological advances and globalization have to massively concentrate wealth in the hands of the few. We simply exploited changing circumstances to take advantage of people with less power than us.”

Hanauer’s argument needs to be repeated. These were political decisions. The savage inequality that’s leading to a pre-civil war type atmosphere in America was created deliberately by the policies of neoliberalism–massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatization, outsourcing and competition in public services.

“Over the last 40 years, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP have increased from about six percent to about 11 percent, while wages as a percentage of GDP have fallen by about the same amount. That represents about a trillion dollars a year that used to go to wages, but now goes to shareholders and executives. One trick we use to keep profits high and labor costs low is to refuse to schedule workers for the 30-plus hours a week they would need to qualify for benefits. Today, an astonishing 6.4 million involuntary part-time workers are denied the full-time work they seek in order to keep our profit margins high. You can call that “the market” or you can call that “stealing,” but from the point of view of a disgruntled worker it amounts to the same thing. How could they not be angry?”

Free-market apostles like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, claimed that unleashing the animal-spirits of the “makers”would benefit all of America with a torrent of wealth that would invariably trickle down.

This was also the argument of the neoliberals. “Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.”

Of course, all these arguments were nothing more that cover story for the biggest heist in history. Free-market economic nostrums, or neoliberalism, or whatever you want to call it, was always about justifying the policies the rich and powerful wanted all along.

The travails of empires at the end of their days have been well recorded by historians. The common denominator in all of the stories is that empires fail when the elite go rogue. We are at that point in America. From palatial homes in coastal enclaves, to prestigious boarding schools, to the private planes that allow them to bypass the terror theater the rest of us are stuck with the elite in America might as well live on a different planet.

Maybe you better sharpen that pitchfork.

 

 

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In our world, creating and nurturing community is a revolutionary act

Posted on July 12, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

The defining characteristic of neoliberalism is it’s use of crisis and disaster to force its market based dogma upon a captive society. In the process, neoliberalism  destroys community and compassion while encouraging rampant and destructive individualism.

This has been a 40 year political as well as economic project of our elite, who chafed at New Deal taxes and regulations. Going further, what bothered them as much as the loss of money was the loss of political power, influence and veneration.

The stag-flation crisis of the 1970’s provided the opportunity to force reforms. In Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, Kim Phillips-Fein, spells out the details of the ruling-class shock doctrine.

“The New York City fiscal crisis was a turning point not just for the city, but the subsequent development of global capitalism. It sounded the death knell for the golden age of postwar liberalism, and heralded the emergence of finance as the leading edge of capital’s dynamism and power. With the city’s balance sheet in shambles, the banks that funded much of New York’s sprawling municipal budget used their financial leverage to foster a major political crisis — and Wall Street’s leading figures wasted little time in taking advantage of it.

The fiscal crisis served as the battering ram for a ruling-class agenda that sought to disempower local elected officials, bring public-sector unions to heel, and justify a brutal austerity program that became the template not just for domestic Reaganism, but for neoliberal “structural adjustment” measures in Latin America and around the world.”

What happened in the US is nothing new. Rulers throughout the history of the world have implemented divide and rule. For example, the English enclosure acts, drove peasants out of a largely self-sufficient village into the maw of the Industrial Revolution, while pitting them against each other as wage slaves. In the process political and economic power was concentrated and consolidated by a new capitalist over-class, while a new working-class was once more placed into chains.

History, however, offers many examples of resistance.

This alternative history of resistance is probably the number one reason that Howard Zinn’s–A People’s History of the United States, engenders such hatred.

The history of resistance reveals that if we want to defeat neoliberalism, we need to recreate communities that are self sufficient and resilient.

In our world, creating and nurturing community is a revolutionary act.

 

 

 

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The flight to serfdom (Part 2)

Posted on July 6, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

Another example of neoliberalism working as planned.

“Mom feared being beaten by United crew, so she didn’t complain when her son’s seat was given away.”

Like I say, you can’t make this shit up.

Sorry, here’s Part-1 

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All the fake news that’s fit to print

Posted on July 3, 2017 by camelotkidd

 

The corporate-media is still freaking-out over fake news. Their concern would have a lot more credibility and sympathy if these so-called respectable news outlets hadn’t been responsible for so much propaganda. Does anyone remember mushroom clouds, aluminum tubes, and weapons of mass destruction, or are they down the memory hole?

In my opinion, the corporate-media is the largest disseminator of fake news, in the interest of promoting endless war.

The election of Donald Trump, who admittedly has a tenuous relationship with the truth, seems to have set the corporate-media off. They’ve spent the entire time since his election in attack mode, hammering him as some sort of Manchurian candidate, controlled personally by Russian leader–Vladimir Putin.

However, when Trump launched a volley of cruise missiles at Syria in response to the supposed chemical attack that Trump saw on CNN, the corporate-media turned on a dime from from attack to praise. The formerly adversarial press couldn’t find enough nice things to say about our kayfabe president.

I always thought the story was bullshit. That the Syrian military would employ chemical weapons when they were winning on the battlefield was always suspect, especially when the opposition, led by Al-Qaeda, has been known to use chemical weapons and has a powerful motive to perpetrate a false-flag attack.

And now we have confirming evidence that the chemical attack was fake news, seized upon by the corporate-media to smear Syria and Russia, all in a dangerous gambit to bring about the conflict that they lust for.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, with sources with first hand knowledge about what the U.S. military and intelligence community actually know, has just published another muckraking article–Trump’s Red Line—in the German newspaper Die Welt.  Hersh reports US intelligence actually warned president Trump it had no evidence that the Syrian military had used sarin gas. Hersh writes that Russia had warned the U.S. about a Syrian military strike before Khan Shaykhun was bombed, and he says that bombing set off secondary explosions that released poisonous gases on the ground.

“The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack,  including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.

Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president’s determination to ignore the evidence. “None of this makes any sense,” one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious.”

So far the corporate-media has completely ignored Hersh’s story, arguably his most explosive, because it shows a President Trump risking triggering a World War III with Russia based upon his own rash decision, over the objections and to the dismay of his own military and intelligence advisers.

Hersh wasn’t able to find a mainstream publisher in the US or the UK. Instead, he had to run it in a German newspaper. Hersh, a longtime reporter for the New York Times, used to be able to publish his signature investigative articles in the New Yorker. However, this time, as Hersh relates, ”I had a hell of a time getting it published.” 

In an interview, Hersh has some perceptive musings on how and why the corporate-media employs fake news in the service of endless war.

“The next few days were Trump’s most successful as president. America rallied around its commander in chief, as it always does in times of war… One prominent TV anchorman, Brian Williams of MSNBC, used the word ‘beautiful’ to describe the images of the Tomahawks being launched at sea. Speaking on CNN, Fareed Zakaria said: ‘I think Donald Trump became president of the United States.

…If you remember, the cry immediately was that Bashar had gassed his own people again with sarin as he allegedly did four years earlier. Then the Russians chimed in by denying it. Here you had Syria which is obviously very much hated by most Americans I guess. The polls probably show that. We don’t like Bashar Assad, and so for the president it was the easy win. He’d bomb somebody nobody likes. From the press reaction today, it’s clear that not liking Syria and not liking Russia for the mainstream press is much more important than what the president did which always surprises me but maybe it shouldn’t.”

As you can see, the corporate-media fake news conforms to the official Washington consensus of US empire, which is why the deep state, the military-industrial complex, the neo-cons or whatever one wants to call the permanent war-party will never allow Trump to pursue a detente with Putin.

Fifteen years ago, the Bush administration used fake news about weapons of mass destruction to start a war in Iraq that led to the deaths of millions. Now the Trump administration, with the full support of the corporate-media and the entire political establishment, is using fake news to escalate a war that could result in a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia.

War, as they say, truly is the health of the state.

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