Revolution Blues

Posted on September 29, 2015 by camelotkidd

In the US we have a neoliberal political and economic consensus among elites that has produced deregulation for corporations and banks, tax cuts and subsidies for the wealthy, punitive austerity for the poor, and a violent, militaristic foreign policy focused on dominating the Middle-East by use of terrorist proxies.

Let’s tally just a few of the recent outrages, shall we?

We have the US military working with pedophiles in Afghanistan and working with terrorists in Syria. We also have the largest US energy corporation–Exxon/Mobil–hiding it’s own evidence of global warming since 1977. And, just to top it off, we have a US justice department that’s more concerned about prosecuting international soccer officials than prosecuting rogue bankers who destroyed our economy.

This is our country if we care to look—endless war, unabated political criminality, economic looting, social upheaval, surveillance and cyber terror, and a military/intelligence/financial deep-state.

Does anyone examining this state of affairs honestly think that the best days are ahead for America?

Americans are starting to notice that these policies have not only failed, but are making them poorer and the world they inhabit far more dangerous. For evidence of these sentiments, look no further than the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders benefitting, as they are, from the contempt voters feel for present US economic and foreign policies.

Here at Camelotkidd posts about political-economy, foreign policy and the deep-state are interesting and informative but they’re also a way to expose the rotten core of America’s ruling consensus. In fact, that’s the whole point of this blog–to delegitimize the existing political and economic order in that we might begin to transform it into something better.

One of the best writers and futurists, John Michael Greer, comments on the challenges we face going forward and how we’re also going to have to create an entirely new narrative to describe this transformation.

“As the neoliberal consensus shatters and the failure of its policies becomes impossible to ignore any longer, another world is not merely possible, it’s inevitable. The question is purely what ideas, visions, dreams, hopes, and shuddering terrors will shape the world that will emerge from neoliberalism’s smoldering corpse—and that, dear reader, will be determined in part by what you yourself are willing to imagine, to work for, and to struggle for, during the difficult years ahead of us.” 

 

 

 

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Epic Fail

Posted on September 28, 2015 by camelotkidd

Here’s what our efforts in Syria have amounted to.

“The West is more hated than ever. A recent poll found that 80 per cent of Syrians believe we created the Islamic State — a common belief, incidentally, throughout the Middle East (and not entirely inaccurate). So it took Washington and its reactionary Gulf allies four years and billions of dollars to end up eating humble pie. They have now effectively admitted that Moscow was right about Syria all along. In the process, they have undermined any humanitarian credibility our military adventurism may still have had after the Iraq nightmare.”

This is what the neoconservatives in charge of US foreign policy have wrought.

Savor it.

Will any one pay any price for this epic fail, or will they saunter on to a new and more exciting failure?

Personally, I’m betting on new and more exciting failure, since the neoconservatives never say they are sorry and never ever get held responsible for their ongoing failures.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote from the Great Gatsby seems about right in describing them.

“They were careless people—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Update: It just gets better and better.

“In another embarrassing setback for one of President Barack Obama’s centerpiece strategies for defeating the Islamic State, the Pentagon said Friday that the commander of U.S.-trained Syrians appears to have turned over his pickup trucks and weapons to al Qaeda militants in exchange for protection within days of re-entering his homeland.”

 

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“Boy Play”

Posted on September 23, 2015 by camelotkidd

Thought I’d become inured to “war-on-terror” blowback.

Boy was I wrong.

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

Of course, we have to allow the rape of young boys because the Taliban(who we’re fighting in Afghanistan) wants to outlaw this odious practice, just as they want to ban the opium trade, by the way. This definitely poses a problem for US policy, since if the Taliban is for something we, by definition, must be against it.

That guy Orwell wrote something about this sort of crazy up-is-down, endless war situation, I think.

What was the name of that book again?

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Ahmed

Posted on September 22, 2015 by camelotkidd

14 years since 9/11 and we’re still so deathly afraid of terrorists that we freak the fuck out and arrest and handcuff a teenage honor student for making a clock and bringing it to school. To no ones surprise, his name was Ahmed Mohamed.

Home of the brave, indeed.

That’s what’s going on in the homeland. Meanwhile, in the Middle-East we’re busy palling around with terrorists as part of a foreign policy that makes less and less sense with each passing day. Many have commented on the fact that America has, “descended into a morass of fearful confusion,” with the arrest of Ahmed but few have noticed the fundamental contradictions in the whole war on terror narrative. We’re scared to death of scary-brown terrorists here in the homeland yet we’re busy employing Al Qaeda, our supposed arch-enemy and also scary-brown terrorists, in Syria as a force to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Close US allies, especially Saudi Arabia, also sponsor terrorism and terrorists, according to no less an authority than Vice President Joe Biden. Biden claims that Saudi Arabia and the other Arab gulf states “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into … Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world,” groups that eventually morphed into ISIS.

Noted MIT Professor of Linguistics, Noam Chomsky, comments on this support for terrorists by US allies and what sort of Frankenstein monster they have created. “Among Islamic states, Saudi Arabia is far in the lead as a sponsor of Islamic terror, not only by direct funding by wealthy Saudis and others in the Gulf but even more by the missionary zeal with which the Saudis promulgate their extremist Wahhabi-Salafi version of Islam through Quranic schools, mosques, clerics, and other means available to a religious dictatorship with enormous oil wealth. The ISIS is an extremist offshoot of Saudi religious extremism and its fanning of jehadi flames.”

I’m really starting to think there’s something to the whole deep state thing with the schizophrenic nature of US policy towards Syria in utilizing Sunni terrorists as a means to carry out regime change while simultaneously bombing them. Why, it’s almost like there are two centers of power vying for control over US foreign policy.

To fully comprehend how the war on terror narrative was rewritten–from fighting Al Qaeda to utilizing them–a good place to start is The Redirection, by Seymour Hersh, written in 2007, during the last years of the Bush administration. It’s scary how prescient that article was.

When one examines the US history of employing Sunni terrorists for foreign policy objectives, a pattern emerges. It turns out that employing terrorism is a brutally efficient and cost effective means of advancing American objectives. These objectives amount to fragmenting states and destroying social bonds across societies, all the better to plunder resources and control political trajectories.

The only problem with this approach, in addition to the obvious moral quandaries, is that the neoconservatives who have formulated and are busy carrying out these horrible policies are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Pretty much everything they have touched has turned to shit. They have an epic record of failure yet not one of them has ever been held accountable. Even more alarming is that even as they lurch from one catastrophe to the next they still wield powerful levers of power within the US government and elite media.

In the meantime, we are left to stew in the “Islamaphobia” and racism stirred up by the neoconservative architects of the endless war on terror. Given that American citizens live in a sea of ignorance, these sorts of crazy incidents like the arrest of Ahmed for bringing a clock to school will become normalized.

 

 

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There is an Alternative

Posted on September 14, 2015 by camelotkidd

Turns out that there is an alternative, after all.

“Something astonishing has just occurred in British politics. On Saturday, the Labour Party elected Jeremy Corbyn, a 66-year-old, unabashed socialist, as its new leader. Corbyn won a staggering 59.5 percent of the vote in a four-way contest. He is the most left-wing leader in Labour’s history, a serial dissenter within the party, a man who nobody ever thought would win the leadership election.”

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Sowing the Wind

Posted on September 11, 2015 by camelotkidd

Recently a friend asked me about the refugee crisis in Europe. “What’s it all about? Why are these people fleeing their countries with their children?

I explained that the existential refugee crisis in Europe is directly caused by US wars in the Middle-East, notably the invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, and the ongoing Syrian civil war fomented by the US and the Gulf States in an effort to overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.

This line of reasoning perplexes my friend as she, like most American’s, wholeheartedly believes in American exceptionalism. This is understandable since the US propaganda system presents the US as a bastion of peace, democracy and prosperity, while the rest of the world is a dreadful mess riven by endless crises and insoluble problems. The US is portrayed as the protector of democracy even as it pursues ruthless hegemonic military and economic policies at the expense of the rest of the world. Hidden in plain sight is the fact that the current crisis is deeply rooted in U.S. policies since World War II, as this article at Global Research makes depressingly clear.

The crisis is totally out of control, and it’s direct blowback from the US and its allies’ regime change operations in Libya and Syria. Europe gains nothing whatsoever from this and is anxiously trying to mitigate the fallout while giving off the impression of partial compliance with its heavily promoted ‘values’, but conversely, Europe’s pain is the US’ gain. Washington is seeing to it that the continent’s most prominent countries (France and Germany, in particular) are caught up in a demographic nightmare, a time bomb of sorts that can be strategically activated at will in the event that these states ever decide to pursue policies independent of the US’ dictates.

What’s even more remarkable is that the US policy of endless war and regime change is promulgated by a small clique of neoconservatives holdovers from the Bush administration that President Obama allowed to fester within the American deep state–the ongoing nexus of military/intelligence/foreign policy that exists semi-independent of any administration.

Veteran journalist Robert Parry, who broke the Iran/Contra story in the 1980’s, says that by failing to rein in the neoconservatives, President Obama has allowed this narrative of regime change to become the dominant meme by claiming that the US is promoting democracy by ridding the world of evil dictators.

“Instead of the promised wonders of “democracy promotion” and “human rights,” what these “anti-realists” have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing – such as that there hasn’t been enough regime change.”

Parry, who has been observing the neoconservatives since the Reagan administration where they were responsible for murderous US policies in Central America, says that refugees are a direct result of these regime change schemes.

“The poor Central Americans, as they tried to shed generations of repression and backwardness imposed by brutal right-wing oligarchies, faced U.S. neocon ideologues who unleashed death squads and even genocide against peasants, students and workers. The result – not surprisingly – was a flood of refugees, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, northward to the United States. The neocon “success” in the 1980s, crushing progressive social movements and reinforcing the oligarchic controls, left most countries of Central America in the grip of corrupt regimes and crime syndicates, periodically driving more waves of what Reagan called “feet people” through Mexico to the southern U.S. border.” 

That the US bears responsibility for the refugee crisis in Europe is not something that most American’s want to hear. In fact, American’s are especially loath to understand foreign policies that present the US in an unfavorable light. In their world, the US is a benevolent sheriff keeping order in a dangerous world, rather that a brutal empire whose very policies are creating these heartbreaking pictures of  human tragedy.

Maybe Americans, even ones who are smart and well informed, just can’t bring themselves to accept this awful reality. In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell writes about how societies fail to see their own crimes as they meanwhile castigate the enemy for their crimes.

Meanwhile, the US views all foreign policy through a military prism. We don’t do diplomacy, that’s for sissies. If force doesn’t work, then more force will. The problems with this approach ought to be obvious. We’re creating a more chaotic and dangerous world while enriching the military/intelligence/industrial, deep state that’s already raising profound questions about our constitutional system of democracy.

These types of refugee problems are only beginning. The policies the US has chosen to implement are only going to create more conditions that make people want to flee their homes and try to make it to western countries like ours. Contrast this coming reality with politics in the US. Presently we’re enduring a presidential race where the Republican candidates are all espousing anti-immigrant rhetoric and one candidate–Trump–is talking about building a giant wall between the US and Mexico.

What’s going to happen when the US gets a real emigration crisis like the one in Europe?

 

 

 

 

 

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Even a blind pig

Posted on September 4, 2015 by camelotkidd

Even a blind pig will find a nut from time to time.

“But if you think Iran is the only source of trouble in the Middle East, you must have slept through 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Nothing has been more corrosive to the stability and modernization of the Arab world, and the Muslim world at large, than the billions and billions of dollars the Saudis have invested since the 1970s into wiping out the pluralism of Islam — the Sufi, moderate Sunni and Shiite versions — and imposing in its place the puritanical, anti-modern, anti-women, anti-Western, anti-pluralistic Wahhabi Salafist brand of Islam promoted by the Saudi religious establishment.

It is not an accident that several thousand Saudis have joined the Islamic State or that Arab Gulf charities have sent ISIS donations. It is because all these Sunni jihadist groups — ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Nusra Front — are the ideological offspring of the Wahhabism injected by Saudi Arabia into mosques and madrasas from Morocco to Pakistan to Indonesia.

And we, America, have never called them on that — because we’re addicted to their oil and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.”

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Mittens

Posted on September 3, 2015 by camelotkidd

Mitt Romney is deeply upset with the lack of civility by Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, and is threatening another run for president if things don’t improve.

“Romney himself has become one of Trump’s most vocal detractors inside the party. “He’s someone to whom civility means a lot. The whole Trump thing really bothers him,” a close Romney adviser told me.”

I don’t believe Mittens for a moment. It’s not Trump’s incivility that has Mittens panties in a bunch, it’s Trump’s attack on carried interest that infuriates him.

Trump has been speaking out about the tax code and the way it is biased towards the financial industry with hedge funders like Mittens able to pay a much lower rate than say a teacher or secretary. Last week Trump almost sounded like a progressive when talking about the tax code:

“I would change it. I would simplify it. I would take carried interest out, and I would let people making hundreds of millions of dollars a year pay some tax, because right now they are paying very little tax and I think it’s outrageous. I want to lower taxes for the middle class. I do very well, I don’t mind paying some taxes. The middle class is getting clobbered in this country. You know the middle class built this country, not the hedge fund guys, but I know people in hedge funds that pay almost nothing and it’s ridiculous, OK?”

Compare what Trump has to say about tax fairness, to the basic GOP talking point of lowering all taxes, including those for the hedge funds guys, and the decades long project to convince ordinary Americans that lowering taxes on “job creators” is how to ensure widespread prosperity. That this has proven to not be the case matters not the least. It’s an ongoing project as this article by the Weekly Standard makes abundantly clear.

“Contrary to the fevered imagination of the exasperated American Left, conservative candidates for public office do not tend to take a free-market approach to fiscal policy because it helps “the rich,” but because they believe in earnest that it helps the whole country. By and large, this same rule applies to conservative voters, many of whom may not always benefit directly from the lack of meddling and modest confiscation, but who conceive nevertheless that a capitalistic economy is likely to deliver better results in the long term than is a power-hungry Uncle Sam… “

Tell me another one.

And now Donald Trump is challenging this tax cutting meme in a way that resonates with the lower income Republicans that are also attracted to Trump’s nativist resentment and xenophobia.

The horror.

The conservative project for the last 40 years has been about lowering taxes on the wealthy.

Full stop.

Now, a blowhard like Trump is ruining everything. Didn’t he listen to Mittens in 2012 explaining how the US is divided between the makers and the takers? Doesn’t he understand that the makers like Mittens must be able to pay their taxes at a capital gains rate of 15% rather than an income tax of 35% lest they be forced to flee the country and leave us takers to stew in our misery?

I have one more thing to say about this latest turn of events.

Run Mittens, run.

Sorry, two things to say.

Pass the popcorn.

 

 

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Interesting Times

Posted on August 28, 2015 by camelotkidd

Holy shit!

Leave on vacation and look what happens.

Here, I thought August is supposed to be a slow month.

It’s hard not to look around right now and feel like the end of the world is upon us with the stock market turmoil leading a former British official to call for people to stock up on food and water in case of a social collapse. Then there’s Donald Trump waging a dark fascist campaign that appeals to American No-Nothing tendencies.

Still, the stock market is not the real economy, even though long conflated as such. In fact all the growth in the stock market has come at the expensive of the real economy that employees Americans and makes things.

In an interview with Democracy Now!. economist Michael Hudson talked about the reasons for the gyrations in the stock market that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average initially fall a record 1,100 points before closing down nearly 600 points on Monday.

“The real problem is that we’re still in the aftermath of when the bubble burst in 2008… all of the growth in the economy has only been in the financial sector, in the monopolies—only for the 1 percent. And it’s as if there are two economies, and the 99 percent has not grown. And so, the American economy is still in a debt deflation. So the real problem is, stocks have doubled in price since 2008, and the economy, for most people, certainly who listen to your show, hasn’t grown at all.”

And, Donald Trump has certainly livened up the Republican presidential campaign by waging a populist insurgency against party elites. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic contender, who’s getting large crowds by laying out a series of progressive policies, is doing the same thing from the Democratic side in his challenge to the preordained candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s appeal is not all nativist resentment. His campaign has articulated progressive policies, like strengthening Medicare and Social Security and ending the carried interest scam that allows investment bankers and hedge fund managers to pay a much smaller percentage of income tax than a teacher or secretary, to the consternation of Republican insiders.

May you live in interesting times is purported to be a Chinese curse, but it does have a certain appeal. With change comes the possibility for new policies and certainly American economics and politics has become stultifying, what writer Andrew O Hehir describes as the Washington consensus.

“Through a confluence of material and ideological interests, the Western world’s financial powers and political parties and media organizations, along with the interlocking permanent governments sometimes called the “deep state,” have come together around a conception of political reality they describe as the only reality. This is the “Washington consensus,” a blend of postwar American foreign policy and Reagan-Thatcher economics: Globalized free trade and venture capitalism, government austerity, widespread privatization and “developing markets,” with the money flowing upward and cheap consumer goods for the so-called middle class.”

American’s of all political bents are waking up to the reality that our nations elite could not give a fuck about them and they are acting accordingly in their support of candidates that promise to shake things up.

It could get interesting

 

 

 

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Wedgie

Posted on July 30, 2015 by camelotkidd

To accomplish their economic agenda conservatives have historically used race, crime, abortion, and gay marriage as divisive wedge issues. It’s the same today. Indeed, government at every level is under attack by the forces of organized wealth and their political enablers who despise a US government that works for the people, and have no compunctions about using every wedge issue they can dream up.

As an example of how this works, here’s gambler–Bill Bennet, back in the 1980’s describing how school vouchers can fracture the New-Deal Democratic coalition. This passage is illustrative because the same dynamic applies with other wedge issues.

“Former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett understood what was missing from the voucher political chemistry: minorities. If visible elements of the Black and Latino community could be ensnared in what was then a lily-white scheme, then the Right’s dream of a universal vouchers system to subsidize general privatization of education, might become a practical political project. More urgently, Bennett and other rightwing strategists saw that vouchers had the potential to drive a wedge between Blacks and teachers unions, cracking the Democratic Party coalition. In 1988, Bennett urged the Catholic Church to “seek out the poor, the disadvantaged…and take them in, educate them, and then ask society for fair recompense for your efforts”–vouchers.”

Think of wedge issues as a means of guerrilla warfare, all to advance a conservative economic agenda. Rick Perlstein, the superb chronicler of the modern conservative movement, explains that modern American conservatives, who he describes as the New Right, used whatever they could find to exploit, including–“…all the pent-up venom of a generation of lower-middle-class people who feel betrayed and exploited.” One of the leaders of the new right, Howard Phillips, articulated their strategy– “We organize discontent.”

The backers of these movements cared little for the social issues. What they cared about was low taxes and minimal interference in their business affairs by the federal government. It’s the same thing today, using social issues to advance a conservative economic agenda. Do you really think the Koch brothers give rats-ass about gay marriage or abortion? They have the same concerns business owners did when FDR enacted the New Deal economic reforms that created the American middle-class. They resent the intrusion of government into their affairs now just as they did then. One of the best economists you never heard of wrote a very influential paper explaining this hostility to government intrusion. Michael Kalecki’s Political Aspects of Full Employment, is worth examining to see what has changed and what is still the same. Kalecki was a Polish economist in the Keynesian tradition, who realized that many of the arguments made against full-employment were political in nature rather than economic.

“…discipline in the factories’ and ‘political stability’ are more appreciated than profits by business leaders.  Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment is an integral part of the ‘normal’ capitalist system.”

It’s all about power and control. Having government enact policies that aid average Americans is an affront to the people that own this country. In the modern way of doing things government is supposed to subsidize corporate power and let the market take care of the social good. Both parties agree with only the details of how this happens dividing them.

Wedge issues are so damn effective because one political party, the Republicans, have mastered the art of fear, appealing to the 20 or 30 percent of Americans who are reactionary. These people are, in a word, afraid. Republican politicians cynically exploit these fears by ominously warning of hordes of ISIS terrorists joining forces with Mexican rapists, or something. Sorry for the graphic visual but I listened to Fox News for a minute when my mom was here last week.

The Democrats are so vulnerable to wedge issues because they’ve abdicated their role of representing American workers who are under siege with rising inequality, loss of full time jobs and a whole host of economic insecurities. Mark Ames goes further and makes it abundantly clear that wedge issues in America are effective in a large part because of spite and that conservatives understand this better than progressives, who want to pretend that in the absence of economic populism American’s just want to do the right thing.

“What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.”

Democrats need to get back to economic populism and forget about being nice. Americans know they’re being screwed and they need a villain. Bill Curry, says that Democrats can tap into voter discontent, but they better start talking like Bernie.

“As I’ve written here before, the country agrees with Democrats on nearly every issue now under debate — and by margins often exceeding 60/40. The list includes not just progressive economic policies like a minimum wage and paid family leave, but climate change, gun safety, gay marriage, the lifting of the Cuban embargo, all of the president’s immigration reforms, every tax proposal and nearly every budget priority. We say we’re polarized, but on these big issues we’re as near to consensus as we ever get. Voters who agree with Democrats vote Republican because of their fury at the condition of their government. Democrats are the party of government. If the Democrats won’t fix the government, voters won’t let them near it.”

Update: It’s about to get worse.

“As an unprecedented shift in public opinion brought about the legalization of gay marriage, a vigorous counter-current has been intensifying under the banner of “religious freedom”—an incredibly slippery term.”

 

 

 

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