“Corporations are people, my friend,”

Posted on February 12, 2015 by camelotkidd

Political/economy is who gets what, and who pays the price. We forget this adage at our own peril.

The wealthy and the corporations they own have captured our government and are imposing on us the policies that benefit them. Contrary to free market ideologues, markets aren’t organic, they’re created by governments. The important question is how they’re organized and who they benefit.

The US economy is organized under the auspices of neoliberalism, resulting in the unchecked reach of huge multinational corporations into every aspect of our lives. We’ve already discussed how privatization of the commons has helped create this new semi-feudal economy.

Another front in the neoliberal assault on the US economy has been the evisceration of antitrust laws. New Deal reforms brought about antitrust laws to force corporations to act in the public interest. Antitrust laws were a political solution to the corporate monopolies that made life so pernicious for Americans prior to the 1930’s. But, the wealthy hated any sort of check on their power and it was only a matter of time before these laws were subverted.

Matt Stoller, former Senior Policy Advisor to Congressman Alan Grayson, lays out the grisly details.

“In the 1980s, an intellectual revolution took hold. Corporations were no longer private governments. They became property.  They weren’t political entities, but economic entities pursuing ‘efficiency’. Corporations exist only for shareholder benefit.  This idea was radical. Prior to this, few thought large shareholders were the only stakeholders, or even the most important ones.  Eliminating all other interests – workers, managers, customers, communities, national security, small shareholders – was truly radical.”

These were political decisions carried out by neoliberal ideologues and the transformation of American economic life has been truly radical. Maximizing shareholder value and focusing on corporate efficiency led directly to the rampant inequality, layoffs, offshoring, monopolies and oligopolies that are such a part of modern America economic life.

Before the neoliberal intellectual revolution, corporations were forced to compete in a regulated environment where they had to spend money on research and development, rather than just acquire smaller competitors, then lay off their workers.

If all we care about is economic efficiency and shareholder value then monopolies are inevitable because monopolies are efficient and they’re profitable for shareholders. They are not, however, beneficial to we-the-people. Examining the ownership of stock in the US illustrates which class benefits from the ideology of shareholder value.

It’s frustrating that Americans seem to have forgotten economic realities their grandparents understood implicitly. New Deal reforms that included antitrust statutes were achieved only after a ferocious struggle, including labor strife and political tumult. Antitrust efforts were accompanied by labor reforms that allowed workers to organize and bargain collectively, as a way of balancing corporate power.

And yet, here we are, the next Gilded Age hard upon us. Corporations have more rights than we do. You know it and I know it. As Mittens explained to us in that infamous rebuke to a heckler, corporations really are people. Except, they’re extra-special, super-powerful people who can never die. Yeah, except for that, just like you and I.

At one point in American history, corporations were chartered to perform specific tasks. Of course, we’re not going back to that reality, but corporations require regulations, including antitrust laws to protect us from them.

We are bombarded daily with horror stories of government overreach. Despite this non-stop propaganda, its pretty clear that corporations, not government, maintains the whip hand.

But I gotta ask. Is our new economy dominated by powerful corporations really what we want?

If not, then we better get busy. A good place to start is antitrust. Matt Stoller explains that antitrust laws are still there, waiting to be dusted off and deployed.

“Most of the laws that forced this state of affairs are still on the books. The were just reinterpreted by Reagan.  Any President can simply go back to the pre-1981 model through executive action. Every merger is still reviewed by DOJ.”

 

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Back to the Future

Posted on February 7, 2015 by camelotkidd

Ideologies that serve elite interests never really go away, they just reconstitute in new guises.

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, author David Harvey argues provocatively that neoliberalism is a continuation of early capitalism, whereby modern corporations are busy re-privitizing the commons.

“Accumulation by dispossession is the main mechanism whereby neoliberalism achieved this redistribution of wealth. Also, accumulation by dispossession is an extension of the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation whereby during the onset of capitalism, common lands were privatized, labour was commodified, and exchange was monetized and financialized.”

At this point, it’s probably a good idea to examine the origins of capitalism. Early capitalism in Great Britain necessitated the enclosure laws, where peasants where driven off the land by government force at the behest of the factory owners who required a large desperate workforce to slave away in their dangerous factories. Before the enclosure laws, peasants could hunt, gather and maintain a small garden plot, enabling them to make a living and enjoy some measure of autonomy.

In The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation, Michael Perelman examines early capitalism and reminds us that economic writers such as Adam Smith portrayed early capitalism as “a natural system of voluntary market relations, which are devoid of conflict, and benefitted all of mankind.”

What really happened was the violent seizure of other people’s means of production– primitive accumulation.

As Perelman articulates, the peasants were “forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention.”

In reality, capitalism absolutely necessitated government intervention. Violent intervention. The peasants were forced off their land by the British government who attacked the economic independence of the rural peasantry through a series of Enclosure Acts.

“Some enclosures had to be carried out by force and many sparked resistance from users of the common land, including the tearing down of fences used to enclose the land. As a historically significant process of land privatization, the Enclosure Acts are sometimes seen as one or both of building blocks of capitalism and theft by major landowners from the peasantry.”

Silly peasants. How are capitalists supposed to make their fortune without a vast pool of workers willing to perform any number of hazardous jobs to stay alive? The great thing about early capitalism, at least from the perspective of the owners, was that the early capitalist didn’t have to take care of their workers. This was a new development unlike centuries past where the feudal lord owed some measure of care to the serfs.

Wealth in America was acquired much the same way as in Great Britain, through primitive accumulation. British colonialism of North America was simply the next stage. Capitalism requires new markets, raw materials, and workers to grow, which it must. Having a new world to plunder was essential.

In A Peoples History of the United States, Howard Zinn makes this abundantly clear. ” …the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’.”

OK, so the British colonists used primitive accumulation to acquire wealth. Didn’t we have a glorious American revolution to overthrow the redcoats and end this plunder?

Not exactly.

The new American elite quickly used the success in the revolt against Great Britain for primitive accumulation of their own. The American revolution was an elite revolution, after all. This salient fact helps explain the differing response from the aristocrats of Europe to the French Revolution versus their response to the American Revolution. One was deeply threatening because of the proletariat nature of the revolutionaries whereas the other was just swapping one set of elite for another.

Certainly we’ve moved past that now, right?

Progress, while uneven, does happen. Decades of struggle combined with the shock of the Great Depression brought New Deal reforms to the US.

However, by the 1970’s the liberal regulatory state just wasn’t working out for the wealthy. They didn’t have all the money and there was a real lack of bowing and scraping going on. Under neoliberalism, the privatization of previously publicly owned parts of the mixed economy was instituted as a means to reconstitute class power.

In essence, neoliberals re-privitized the commons.

The conservative architects of the neoliberal economic transformation were clever. To enact their agenda they needed to do what rulers have done for centuries–divide and rule. As writer Rick Perlstein, makes abundantly clear in his seminal work Nixonland, conservatives bent on overturning New Deal reforms set about employing a Southern strategy to convince poor whites to vote against their own economic self interests as a backlash against the Civil Rights laws passed by the Johnson Administration.

The Christian right was also deployed to further neoliberal economic and political goals. These conservative Christians viewed the liberal state as providing special privileges to groups such as gays and lesbians (same sex marriage), and women (abortion), which they morally disagreed with. That these ruinous economic policies hurt these denizens of the Christian right who came from the poorest part of the United States and stood to lose the most from an adoption of neoliberal economic reforms was a bonus. Instead of casting blame on the real villains, these Christian conservatives just doubled down in their hatred of government.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

What has this corporate seizure of the commons brought us? Crumbling infrastructure, schools and roads. And, with corporations keeping profits offshore to prevent taxation, and opposition in government to public spending, the only solution offered is more privatization. The corporations that presently sit astride the commons, keep jacking up the price of living with their rent gauging and contractual rip-offs. Examples are everywhere–Monsanto, Tyson, Goldman Sachs, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Wal-Mart, etc. Especially pernicious are the payday loan and check cashing services.

The privatization of roads, utilities, schools and water have returned us to a semi-feudal state, and made it near impossible to exist outside the corporate universe. How much better would it be if we had public infrastructure to allow us to make a living as a small businessman or craftsman? Or, being able to live your life on your own terms, without a ton of dough? And, what about having time and space to create a vibrant society, where moms or dads have the time to take care of kids and or parents, volunteer for community service, coach Little League, or mentor a Scout troop?

These are the questions we ought to be asking of our government officials.

Political/economy is who gets what, and who pays the price. By re-privatizing the commons, corporations are enriching themselves and impoverishing the rest of us.

There is another way available to us. Progressive era economist, Simon Patten believed that keeping infrastructure in the public domain would reduce the overall price structure and allow small businesses to flourish. What Patten referred to as the forth factor of production, would help foster an economy where all could participate. 

Simon Patten (1852–1922) argued that “…freeing markets from one source of economic rent (by taxing land rent) would merely leave the surplus to be taken by other monopolists and rent extractors (railroads, Wall Street trusts, and basic privatized utilities). To prevent unearned income (economic rent) from adding to the economy’s cost of living and doing business, potentially rent-yielding infrastructure should be kept in the public domain as a “fourth factor of production.” Instead of rentiers making a profit by charging access fees and user fees, the return to public investment should take the form of reducing the economy’s overall price structure.”

Here’s a great example of how it can be done, with the FCC chairman proposing that we treat the internet as a public utility.

“In an op-ed to Wired magazine posted online, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said his plan would regulate Internet service much like phone service or any other public utility by applying Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Market is the Master

Posted on January 21, 2015 by camelotkidd

There is a vague sense of a new order growing up around us. Sometimes there’s a brief glimpse of it. Sometimes late at night there’s a whisper of it on the wind.

I’m referring to neofeudalism–a confluence of neoliberalism and neoconservatism that is forging a new kind of political/economy that represents a fundamental break with previous American ideas about citizenship, self governance, and economic security.

We now live in world of savage inequality cemented into place by a bifurcated system of justice and governance. There are two sets of laws: one set for the elite and the corporations they control, and another set for us. Our government, though nominally a democratic republic, acts to enforce this perverse dynamic.

Neoliberalism + neoconsevatism = neofeudalism.

“The most recent analysis of U.S. wealth inequality finds the top 1 percent of U.S. wealth holders have 39.8 percent of the country’s individual wealth. The top 10 percent have 74.4 percent, which leaves 25.6 percent for the bottom 90 percent.”

A large part of neofeudalism is the reliance on the market as the master. Having overseers to watch the serfs was so Dark-Ages. Now, with the relentless drive to privatize every aspect of modern day life, Americans are oppressed by market strictures.

Don’t want to be part of the marketplace?

Too bad.

The Affordable Care Act is the most immediate example of the government coercing a market based outcome, but the privatization of education, pensions, prisons, roads, utilities and water, promises more of the same.

Lambert at Naked Capitalism, has long been on the neofeudalism beat. Here he is describing how the Obama’s Affordable Care Act is forcing Americans into a market for healthcare leading to neofeudalism.

“One of the things I hate most about ObamaCare is the vicious and relentless way that it creates first- and second-class citizens. ObamaCare does this by construction, of course: ObamaCare’s central concept of eligibility — the outright denial that health care is a human right, but is instead just another pigfest of rental extraction — necessarily implies that those who are “eligible” and those who are not eligible are granted different levels of access to care.

By design, ObamaCare doesn’t treat health care as a right, and does not give all citizens equal access to health insurance, let alone to health care. By design, ObamaCare preserves private health insurance as a rental extraction mechanism, along with its complex and bug-prone system of eligibility determination by past (and projected) income, age, existing insurance coverage, jurisdiction, family structure, and market segment.”

The idea of a market based culture is not new. Thomas Frank, in what was his best book, One Market Under God, makes this point forcefully. Since then the relentless subordination to the market has only accelerated.

It’s not just any market that I’m referring to. It’s the monopoly/oligopoly, state subsidized, neoliberal regime that we have now in the US. I think the poster child for this system would probably have to be Comcast. As in, really, really Comcastic! Economist Michael Hudson pithily describes this extractive phenomenon as–rent seeking as far as the eye can see.

So how did we get to this point where the rich have all the money and power, while everyone else is fighting over the scraps? Class warfare, as Mike Whitney says:

 “If you can’t keep your tycoons in check, you’d might as well throw in the towel and accept a life of indentured servitude now, because that’s where you’re headed anyway. A key element in explaining this whole dynamic is to be found in the falling ratio of wages and salaries as a percentage of national income in the United States. Stagnation in the 1970s led capital to launch an accelerated class war against workers to raise profits by pushing labor costs down. The result was decades of increasing inequality.” (Financial Implosion and Stagnation, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, Monthly Review)”

As Les Leopold writes, there was a plan all along to make this all-American neofeudalism a reality.

“The Better Business Climate model had two key components: cutting taxes on corporations and the super-rich, and reducing regulations, especially on Wall Street. This potent combination was to encourage the rich to invest, which in turn would lead to more jobs and increasing incomes for all.”

Of course, it didn’t turn out that way but it was a nice cover story.

There are important reasons to keep tax rates on the wealthy high that have nothing to do with economics. The political rational for high taxes, is that it keeps the wealthy in check and makes it impossible for them to create our present system of neofeudalism. Cutting taxes of the wealthy allowed them to dominate our political process through campaign contributions, which led to further tax cuts for the rich. Alas, the government still requires taxes to fund operations, so the loss of tax revenue from the wealthy resulted in a rise in taxes for everyone else.

As Leopold explains, this tax increase on the 99% created a perverse dynamic that plays straight into the hands of our new overlords.

  • “As we feel like we are getting less and less for our tax dollars, anti-government sentiment increases.
  • As we experience declining services, the pressure mounts for more tax cuts, which further erodes government services.
  • As we see our wages stagnate and our benefits deteriorate, we turn against public sector workers who seem to have it better.
  • Corporations then swoop in with privatization plans for public services which often cost us more and give us fewer services.”

Wash, rinse, repeat.

We can create a shared society if we desire. It’s that simple. Just one teensy little problem. First, we have to depose our new master–the market–and, of course, the elite architects of this dystopian market-based neofeudal system.

Journalist Chris Hedges, one of the few voices to speak against the corporate-state, who has put himself on the line by making a legal challenge to the President’s authority to indefinitely detain American citizens, summarizes the situation at hand:

 “Our passivity has resulted… in much more than imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politic”

Lewis Carroll captured much of the present day power inequality in his classic work: Through the Looking-Glass.

“When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.

The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things.

The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master — that’s all.”

 

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Terror Theatre

Posted on January 13, 2015 by camelotkidd

That didn’t take long.

Almost on cue we get another terrorist attack in Paris by gunmen claiming to be al-Qaeda.

In the US, the reaction was predictable, with liberals being demonized for encouraging terrorism through their political correctness.

Left largely unmentioned is the real history of Sunni extremism, with the role of US training and support. Of course, this inconvenient fact would interfere with the 24/7 terror, terror, terror, that so animates our present milieu. There’s also the role of the two killers who traveled to Syria to fight in NATO’s proxy war against the government in Damascus, as writer Tony Cartalucci, explains.

“The implications of yet another case of Western-radicalized terrorists, first exported to fight NATO’s proxy war in Syria, then imported and well-known to Western intelligence agencies, being able to carry out a highly organized, well-executed attack, is that the attack itself was sanctioned and engineered by Western intelligence agencies themselves.”

Once again, I find myself in awe of the sheer cunning of the war on terror architects. The more terrorists they create in the pursuit of US foreign policy who, predictably, run amuck and blow back into western countries, the more money, power and control this deep state accrues. It’s a grotesque, yet strangely compelling spectacle.

Journalist Andre Vltchek examines more of the history of the use of ultra-conservative Sunni terrorists in pursuit of an empire the US inherited from Britain. History, that western commentators would be happy to disappear down the memory hole.

“It is very clear from the historical record that without British help neither Wahhabism nor the House of Saud would be in existence today. Wahhabism is a British-inspired fundamentalist movement in Islam. Through its defense of the House of Saud, the US also supports Wahhabism directly and indirectly regardless of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Wahhabism is violent, right wing, ultra-conservative, rigid, extremist, reactionary, sexist, and intolerant…

The West gave full support to the Wahhabis in the 1980s. They were employed, financed and armed, after the Soviet Union was dragged into Afghanistan and into a bitter war that lasted from 1979 to 1989. As a result of this war, the Soviet Union collapsed, exhausted both economically and psychologically.”

Vltchek goes on to explain why right-wing Sunni terrorism is so useful for the US.

“For the Empire, the existence and popularity of progressive, Marxist, Muslim rulers governing the Middle East or resource-rich Indonesia, was something clearly unacceptable. If they were to use the natural wealth to improve the lives of their people, what was to be left for the Empire and its corporations? It had to be stopped by all means. Islam had to be divided, and infiltrated with radicals and anti-Communist cadres, and by those who couldn’t care less about the welfare of their people.”

The US security state wants to have it both ways. The unfettered ability to employ terror against our enemies through terrorists proxies that we secretly train and support, alongside the ability to employ the inevitable terrorist blowback for maximum psychological warfare against the American populace.

It’s terror theatre.

I’m alternately horrified/fascinated by the thought of the crazy reaction to another massive terror attack here in the US, when the inevitable blowback results.

We are so going to lose our shit. Senator Lindsey Graham may actually poop himself on live TV.

Wow.

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Public Diplomacy

Posted on January 7, 2015 by camelotkidd

Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are not an accident of history. They are the ideological components of a sophisticated and largely successful counterattack on the New Deal, that commenced within seconds of the signing of the progressive legislation by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the time, FDR recognized the hostility of Americas ruling elite and understood that they would never stand for these reforms. In 2015, it’s unfortunate that too many Americans have lost sight of this essential political calculation.

This successful counterattack on the political and economic reforms of the New Deal has had a deleterious effect on the non-wealthy American populace. This counterattack has also brought about a new political and economic reality where America is not so much a democratic republic, but a plutocracy–a government controlled by the wealthy and the corporations and banks they control, all protected by the intelligence agencies, military and police.

The long term counterattack against New Deal reforms has been aided enormously by manipulative advertising, public relations and outright propaganda. Investigative reporter Robert Parry has been reporting on these efforts to manage public perceptions since the 1980’s. For his efforts, he can’t work in the mainstream news media, but now writes at Consortiumnews.com, where he provides an invaluable service in the pursuit of accurate information.

In a recent article entitled The Victory of Perception Management, Parry discusses newly discovered documents pertaining to the Iran/Contra scandal that demonstrate that the US government under President Reagan waged a widespread perception management campaign against the American public.

“From documents declassified or leaked over the past several decades, including an unpublished draft chapter of the congressional Iran-Contra investigation, we now know a great deal about how this remarkable project was undertaken and who the key players were.

Perhaps not surprisingly much of the initiative came from the Central Intelligence Agency, which housed the expertise for manipulating target populations through propaganda and disinformation. The only difference this time would be that the American people would be the target population.

For this project, Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director William J. Casey sent his top propaganda specialist Walter Raymond Jr. to the National Security Council staff to manage the inter-agency task forces that would brainstorm and coordinate this “public diplomacy” strategy.”

Essentially, the US elite believe that the American public must never be allowed to look critically at what they are doing. If that means outright propaganda, so be it. Any critical observer can see this ongoing effort on a daily basis, especially in regard to Putin and Russia–I’m looking at you–New York Times.

While Parry won’t say it, I will–The Cold War against communism was and is a key component in the ongoing counterattack against the New Deal reforms. Examining US foreign policy historically reveals that domestic concerns frequently trump strategic considerations. With this idea in mind, I believe that the Cold War, while a real life struggle between the Soviet Union and the US, was also used cynically for domestic ends–largely as a lethal weapon deployed by capital against labor. Communism, as an ideology was just too convenient as a boogyman used to scare Americans into supporting an All-American system of capitalism that disadvantaged them over the long run, resulting in the widespread inequality so visible today.

However, all good things come to an end. Communism was an especially effective boogyman, but the evil terrorist has been dragooned into playing the new scary super-villain quite successfully. Recall the run up to the election in November 2014, with the 24/7 fear mongering about ISIS terrorist, who were infected with ebola, coming to murder us all in our beds?

Good times.

Our elite need an external enemy to be able to continue these ruinous economic policies. Luckily for them the American public has the attention span of a gnat and this ongoing creation of scary monsters can proceed. It does tend to get slightly ludicrous at times, as the latest fable of North Korea hacking Sony’s The Interview, with concerned Americans flocking to see a shitty movie just to show those dastardly North Korean terrorists.

The whole affaire reminds me of a South Park episode, and reinforces the old adage–what starts out as a tragedy segues into a farce.

Welcome to America, where you can’t make this shit up.

Happy New Year!

 

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The Stovepipe

Posted on December 20, 2014 by camelotkidd

The United States tortured prisoners for exploitation and propaganda purposes with the goal to connect al-Qa’ida with Saddam. We used this false information, obtained through torture, to justify the invasion of Iraq.

“…the details in the Senate report concerning the abuse of often totally innocent people are less damning than the evidence that a key reason for the torture was to produce “intelligence” that could be used to build the case for war on Iraq. That splendid little war that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the neocon cabal within the Defense and State Departments, and the all-powerful Office of the Vice President, so deeply craved. That war that destroyed Iraq, killed half a million people, spurred sectarianism, forced millions to flee, generated ongoing civil war and produced the child-beheading ISIL.”

Back in the mists of time this seemed to be understood. In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, when it was apparent there was no weapons of mass destruction and no connections between Saddam and al-Qa’ida, there were strong suspicions about the manufactured intelligence for war and how it was acquired. Recall the Office of Special Plans (OSP)–the secret intelligence office in the Pentagon whose very existence was predicated on making the connection of al-Qa’ida to Saddam, by stove piping intelligence. Stove piping occurs when raw intelligence that hasn’t been vested by professional intelligence analysts gets passed up the chain of command. The neocon zealots in the OSP went over to the dark side and had captives tortured until they linked Saddam to al-Qa’ida.

The intrepid Marcy Wheeler, at Emptywheel, examines the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on torture, which was released 5 years ago, and finds this interesting segment that makes this clear.

“The torture of Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, whose torture-induced claim al Qaeda had ties to Iraq’s WMD programs helped drag us into Iraq,

According to al-Libi, the foreign government service [redacted] “stated that the next topic was al-Qa’ida’s connections with Iraq. … This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.” Al-Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then “placed him in a small box approximately 50cm x 50cm.” He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, alLibi claims that he was given a last opportunity to “tell the truth.” When al-Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al-Libi claimed that “he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back.” Al-Libi told CIA debriefers that he then “was punched for 15 minutes.”216

(U) Al-Libi told debriefers that “after the beating,” he was again asked about the connection with Iraq and this time he came up with a story that three al-Qa’ida members went to Iraq to learn about nuclear weapons. Al-Libi said that he used the names of real individuals associated with al-Qa’ida so that he could remember the details of his fabricated story and make it more believable to the foreign intelligence service. Al-Libi noted that “this pleased his [foreign] interrogators, who directed that al-Libi be taken back to a big room, vice the 50 square centimeter box and given food.”217

Over the weekend we had the architect of torture himself–Dick Cheney–on Meet the Press, defending torture. Of course, the Toddler didn’t broach the possibility of torture for false confessions to justify the war Cheney and the neocons wanted all along. That would be rude.

This reality that “we tortured some folks” to justify the invasion of Iraq is too horrible for the MSM to contemplate. The idea that our leaders are monsters is beyond the pale. It is the truth that dare not be spoken of.

And, anyway, Americans are cool with torture.

“Before Bush, most Americans were against torture.  The endless drumbeat of propaganda and the need to justify what America does (America is good, therefore America does not do evil), has had its effect.”

 

 

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Apple Pie

Posted on December 14, 2014 by camelotkidd

No thoughtful observer of American history can be surprised at the Senate report detailing the torture carried out by the CIA in the aftermath of 9/11. The revelation of torture should be seen as the logical outcome of economic and foreign policies carried out since the US became an empire. The 9/11 attacks only turbo-charged these policies. Since then we’ve suffered the anthrax attacks, the passage of the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq,  revelations of NSA spying, the massive Wall Street crime spree that threw millions of Americans out of their homes and jobs, and the appearance of a financial and political elite that is demonstrably above the law, protected by a police force that can murder with impunity. We are, as Chris Floyd says.

“Living in an age given over to state terror and elite rapine.”

Neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies have been the focus here lately in an attempt to grapple intellectually with this savage milieu. Neoliberal ideology is the force behind the economic policies that have wrecked such havoc and brought about the rampant inequalities that have become impossible to ignore. Neoconservative ideology promotes the use of force to enforce these neoliberal economic policies. Neoconservatives think-tanks proclaim that the US should control the whole world using full spectrum dominance, with the whole thing propagandized as American exceptionalism.

I’ve come to believe that neoliberalism and neoconservatism have merged into neofeudalism–a sort of all-American free market authoritarianism, where torture is just one of the many instruments of statecraft. Recently, we were privileged to see the pure essence of this neofeudal, free market authoritarianism, with former Bush campaign spokeswoman, Nicolle Wallace on TV shrieking–“I don’t care what we did.”

Examining past empires provides strong evidence that crimes and horrors perpetrated by an empire on the periphery always find their way back to the homeland. And lo-and-behold, it turns out that the US empire has been committing lots of crimes on the periphery, with torture the most shocking and egregious example.

US neoliberal economic policies came out of the University of Chicago, under the tutelage of Milton Friedman. These policies were first implemented in Chile in 1973 after the violent coup carried out by General Pinochet, with help from the CIA. Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” advised Pinochet to impose his free market wish list on the country–tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, deregulation and cuts to social spending. As Naomi Klein makes clear in The Shock Doctrine, although Chile was described in glowing term as an economic miracle, the reality was that these economic policies were imposed by force, including torture.

“Pinochet also facilitated the adjustment with his own shock treatments; these were performed in the regimes many torture cells, inflicted on the writhing bodies of those most likely to stand in the way of the capitalist transformation. Many in Latin America saw a direct connection between the the economic shocks that impoverished millions and the epidemic of torture that punished hundreds of thousands of people who believed in a different kind of society. As Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano asked, ‘How can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock?'” 

Every policy carried out by an empire on the periphery returns to the homeland. Today, Americans are treated as disposable with value conferred only if you succeed in transforming yourself into a marketable entity. Americans have become less citizens than consumers, with only consumers having a semblance of rights.(If you manage to read the fine print.) The neoliberal economic policies of the last 40 years have created a vast class of the superfluous people who are controlled by a occupying force of police, as we have recently witnessed in Ferguson.

“Neoliberal policies aim to reduce wages to the bare minimum and to maximize the returns to capital and management. They also aim to de-mobilise workers’ organisations and reduce workers to carriers of labour power — a commodity to be bought and sold on the market for its lowest price. Neoliberalism is about re-shaping society so that there is no input by workers’ organisations into democratic or economic decision-making.”

Neoliberal policies are doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. This rampant inequality visible in the US today is not a bug, but a feature. Neoliberal policies are designed to rip apart civil society and leave individuals at the mercy of corporations and their wealthy owners.

“Human lives are only of interest in their transactional form. Just being alive is meaningless unless you are doing something with money or property. Just walking down the street enjoying the day is nothing. What matters is what you buy. What matters is who you do business with. What matters is working at some job, preferably for next to nothing. What matters is your investments, in financial capital, in human capital, in social capital, and how you manage those investments.”

Neoconservative full-spectrum dominance is the muscle backing up the US neoliberal economic order. New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, in a moment of candor, gives the game away.

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

In Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other outposts of the empire, our military and intelligence agencies force compliance with American neoliberal economic policies, or punish non-compliance. Marine General Smedley Butler recognized this essential reality of what the US military did way back in 1935 when he wrote, War is a Racket:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Here at home not only do we have a militarized police force, witnessed in Ferguson, but our legal system is basically an enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance with neoliberal economic policies, as Ian Welsh makes abundantly clear.

The legal system exists, today, to ensure compliance.

Graph of incarceration in the US over time

American oligarchical society rests on people not effectively resisting.  All gains now go to the top 10%, with the rest of society losing ground.  Incarceration rates blossom in 1980, which is also the year that the oligarchical program is voted in and becomes official.  (Trickle down economics can be understood no other way.)

And the legal system is not just for the poor and downtrodden. If you are a college educated well meaning liberal who has never even had a parking ticket but are opposed to these horrible policies, it doesn’t matter. Welsh describes what happens when you persist.

“Ordinary citizens must understand that they cannot change the system if elites do not agree with the changes they want made.  If they try, they will be arrested and receive a criminal sentence, meaning they can never again have a good job.”

Henry Giroux, Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, points out that the US has long practiced torture, using plausible deniability. What was different after 9/11 was that the US openly embraced torture. He too connects torture to our economic system.

“Maybe it is time to treat the Senate torture report as just one register of a series of crimes being committed under the regime of a savage neoliberalism. After all, an economic policy that views ethics as a liability, disdains the public good, and enshrines self-interest as the highest of virtues provides a petri dish not just for state sanctioned torture abroad but also for a range of lawless and cruel policies at home.”

Giroux makes the obvious point from his reading of the Senate report: 

“Torture is as American as apple pie.”

So be a good neo-serf: Keep your nose to the grindstone and don’t complain.

Or else.

Update: If you want to understand just how lawless America has become, contemplate this: “No one except John Kiriakou is being held accountable for America’s torture policy. And John Kiriakou didn’t torture anyone, he just blew the whistle on it.” 

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A Milo Minderbinder Moment

Posted on December 7, 2014 by camelotkidd

Neoconservatives have a lock on American foreign policy with an intellectual conformity among analysts, commentators and government policy makers that is breathtaking. This has happened, I believe, because neoconservatism represents the strong state necessary for neoliberal economic policies to be implemented nationally and globally. Neoconservatism also appeals to “American exceptionalism,” where in the post 9/11 milieu no politician wants to appear unpatriotic.

“…underneath all the maneuvering, the War Party thrives.  You simply can’t operate in Washington without in some fashion declaring your fealty to wartime thinking and the sanctified post-9/11 dead air that goes with it.  No alternative possibilities, no other options are on that “table” on which “all options” are always said to sit in the nation’s capital.  Should you not toe the line, the national security equivalent of excommunication is in order.” 

Again, that part about neoliberal economic policies requiring a strong state is salient. The US, as the dominant hegemon, uses force to implement its neoliberal economic policies.

“The problems between Ukraine and Russia over Crimea and federalism within Ukraine are a mask designed to cover Obama’s true intentions, which are the smashing of the BRICS as a viable alternative to the neo-colonialist financial systems of the West and subsuming the economies of the BRICS to the whims of the United States and the ever-teetering European Union.”

However, neoconservatives, because of greedy/ideology seem incapable of pursuing a foreign policy that is either wise, coherent, strategic, or cost-effective. To the uninitiated, American foreign policy appears to be a hash.

“Despite ongoing wars and operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, among other places, the results of that experiment are in.  No single war, intervention, or minor conflict in which the U.S. military has taken part in these years has even come close to achieving the objectives set out by Washington and most have proven outright disasters.  In just about every case, armed intervention, whatever form it took, demonstrably made matters worse, increased the destabilization of whatever country or region was involved, and led to the creation of more extremists and terrorists.”

Much like neoliberalism, neoconservatism ideology succors the wealthy and powerful in the US, allowing a small intellectual faction outsized influence, and ensures that neoconservative policies will continue, no matter the outcome. Neocon’s are interesting characters, to say the least.

“The core group consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals. (They are called “neoconservatives” because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right.) They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a P.R. technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neocons published a series of public letters whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel’s campaigns against the Palestinians.”

Neoconservative ideology is one of the chief culprits for the hyper-belligerent US foreign policy since the fall of communism. Neoconservatives have come to articulate, in the post Cold War era, a moral case for worldwide intervention in the name of free market capitalism. The invasion of Iraq was the tragic result of this murderous ideology. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, vividly depicts neoconservatives using Iraq as their test subject for “disaster capitalism.”

“The Iraq invasion marked the ferocious return to the early techniques of the free-market crusade–the use of ultimate shock to forcible wipe out and erase all obstacles to the construction of model corporatist states free from all interference.”

Because neoconservatism has many factions and because this is America, it’s hard to tell where ideology ends and greed begins. The invasion of Iraq was the example of this overlap. Was it ideology, or greed? Hard to tell, maybe a bit of both. It sure helped your case as an investor in post invasion Iraq if you were also a true believer. Remember New Bridge Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, Bush’s head of FEMA, that promised to use its political connections to get American corporations a piece of the action in rebuilding Iraq after the US invasion? What about the poster-child for military privatization gone bad–Halliburton–overcharging taxpayers, while electrocuting US servicemen? Or, Blackwater, the mercenary army hired by the State Department to provide security, murdering Iraqis in Nisour Square? Oh, and don’t forget about the 20 billion dollars sent to Iraq in the early days of the occupation that vanished.

“The cash was literally delivered shrink-wrapped, on pallets, enormous bundles of Benjamins. So where did all that money go? Here and there on the web you can find a conspiracy theory or two, but the obvious answer is usually the correct one. There are no doubt Dubai-based bank accounts of current and former Iraqi government officials swollen with cash, perhaps some accounts of American contractors and various U.S. officials as well.”

There are still enormous amounts of money to be made from the neoconservative project to spread their free-market gospel. Take the war on terror. The more we fight terrorists, the more terrorist we create, and the more money the war on terror participants make. It’s a powerful feedback loop–a self licking ice cream cone. For the military-industrial-complex it’s a beautiful thing.

“But that by now seems to be not a bug but a feature. The “fear business” James Risen talks about is now driving billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars per year into a few private hands. Another 9/11 like event every few years will keep that business going. Letting al-Nusra get experience with U.S. tactics and weapons can only help to further that.”

Recent events are almost surreal in their similarity to fiction and replete with dark humor. In Syria, not only is the US arming and training extremist Sunni fighters, but they are simultaneously bombing them.

“With the documented conspiracy of the US and its allies to create a sectarian mercenary force aligned to Al Qaeda, the so-called “moderate rebels” the US has openly backed in Syria now fully revealed as sectarian extremists, and now with DW documenting a torrent of supplies originating in Turkey, it is clear that the ISIS menace NATO poses as the solution to, was in fact NATO all along. What is  revealed is a foreign policy so staggeringly insidious, few are able to believe it, even with international broadcasters like DW showing ISIS’ supply lines leading from NATO territory itself.”

It’s a Milo Minderbinder moment. First Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder was a fictional character in Joseph Heller‘s Catch-22. As the mess officer, Minderbinder was a war profiteer during World War II. Eventually, Minderbinder begins contracting missions for the Germans, fighting on both sides. At one point Minderbinder orders his fleet of aircraft to attack the American base where he lives, killing many American officers and enlisted men.

“In a democracy, the government is the people,” Milo explained. “We’re people, aren’t we? So we might just as well keep the money and eliminate the middleman. Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.”

In the US, we are well on our way to Milo’s dream. To a large part we’ve privatized and outsourced our military, intelligence and diplomatic functions to the corporate state. And, because the neoconservative war party goes on forever, it doesn’t matter how much they fuck up. They always win.

George Orwell explained why this was so in the novel 1984.

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”

Update: Robert Parry takes neoconservatives to the woodshed, in a scathing critique of The New Republic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My Hate is Pure

Posted on December 3, 2014 by camelotkidd

Every time I calm down, there’s another reminder of the damage that neoliberalism has wrought. Once again, rather than reading about this in the New York Times or Washington Post, this has to be pointed out and emphasized by William Black, at Naked Capitalism. William Black is an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He was the executive director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007.

“We have just seen the three most destructive epidemics of financial fraud in history cause a Great Recession that cost $21 trillion in lost U.S. GDP and over 10 million jobs – and both numbers are far larger in Europe. In addition we have the world’s largest banks and bankers leading the two largest financial frauds in history – the Libor and FX conspiracies – plus banks helping fund one of the most violent drugs cartels (Sinaloa) in the world, genocide in Sudan, and (the U.S. government believes) Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. They also manipulated commodity prices, conspired with the ultra-wealthy to evade taxes, rigged municipal bond bids throughout the U.S., and led the massive sale of grossly inappropriate financial products to millions of people in the UK.”

Both of our flagship newspapers–the New York Times and Washington Post–have become infected with neoliberal economic orthodoxy. The Post whines about Elizabeth Warren being mean to President Obama’s nominee to be undersecretary of the Treasury.  And, the  Times acts as a apologist for finance, and downplays the fact that not one banker has gone to prison as a result of their widespread crime spree.

“The biggest banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup—have all recently paid multibillion-dollar fines stemming from the mortgage fraud perpetrated in the lead-up to and fallout from the crisis, but no top executives have gone to jail. Moreover, those companies copped to civil charges, but have not faced criminal prosecution. This marks a sharp departure from past banking scandals, such as the savings and loan crisis, where more than 1,000 bankers were convicted by the Justice Department through the late 1980s and early 1990s.”

I firmly believe that these epidemics of financial fraud would have been impossible without the tireless work performed by the neoliberals.

To better understand neoliberalism it’s useful to turn to one of the best books written about this ideology. In Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste, Philip Mirowski, agues that neoliberalism is much more complicated than just a way to transfer wealth to the rich and powerful. Personally, I think that was the plan all along, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Anyway, Mirowski is correct when he describes neoliberalism as infinitely complicated. He describes it as the Neoliberal Thought Collective, with multiple strands of the collective stretching throughout academia, government and business. It’s safe to say that neoliberalism has insinuated itself to a large degree in our everyday life. How they did it is quite fascinating.

One of the biggest intellectual scams that neoliberals pulled off was to equate corporate and financial oligopolies with free enterprise, thereby making them respectable and giving them a sheen of righteous morality, almost like a fictional scene out of Atlas Shrugged. Another neoliberal intellectual misdirection was promulgating the notion of desiring a small government, and a laissez-faire economic system, when the opposite was true. If you remember nothing else, remember that neoliberals require a strong state, they control, to implement their version of a “free market.” Chile under Pinochet is an instructive illustration of this requirement for a strong state to carry out neoliberal market policies.

Neoliberal intellectuals also laid the groundwork for the enormous privatization of public infrastructure that allowed corporate and financial oligopolies to set up toll booths on our economy and extract rent, all in the name of market efficiency.

Neoliberals were able to largely succeed, I believe, because opposition by the political party that that had traditionally represented labor has vanished and what remains is theatre. Or, perhaps sports is a better metaphor. The Democratic Party plays the role of the Washington Generals, whose mission was to regularly lose to the Harlem Globetrotters, played by the Republicans. Or, maybe this crude sports metaphor is wholly inadequate. Maybe the Democrats are actually performing their historical role as a crucial component of the Ratchet Effect.

Whatever the reason, the economy the neoliberals constructed is the economy we have. Corporate and financial oligopolies, owned and controlled by the wealthy, supported and feted by the state, with the whole thing described reverently in the media as free enterprise.

If you’re following this, perhaps you can comprehend my rage.

What can we do?

Don’t fight on their terms, use their strength against them. Too many progressives seem incapable of seeing the ground changing under their feet, and believe the neoliberal propaganda about laissez-faire. Instead, we need to welcome markets, but with a caveat: a strong government, controlled by us, that promotes a different type of market system, one where all can participate.

In examining why our present market based system is so biased, we must turn to theories of political/economy, specifically: rent seeking, monopolies and oligopolies. Look around you in America today. What do we have a far as the eye can see? Rent gauging, monopolies and oligopolies. Examples are everywhere–Goldman Sachs, Comcast, Verizon, Wal-Mart, etc.

Many of these oligopolies are the result of corporate seizure of the commons. Progressives would do well to understand the infrastructure-capital concepts of economist, Simon Patten.

Patten believed in a “…fourth factor of production.” Instead of rentiers making a profit by charging access fees and user fees, the return to public investment should take the form of reducing the economy’s overall price structure…rentier rights are legalized tollbooths to extract revenue that rightly should belong in the public sector.”

Getting this version of political/economy will not be easy, to say the least. The corporations and banks that benefit from our present system are not going to go peacefully into the good night.

Next, we’ll talk about the really big impediment to my utopian plan–neoconservatism.

*In memory of Alexander Cockburn

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It’s Their World

Posted on November 28, 2014 by camelotkidd

I think I’ve come up with a working definition/differentiation between neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

Neoliberalism refers to the economic policies the United States pursues, specifically: free enterprise–state subsidized private power with no infringement on managerial prerogatives. Neoliberalism is not, contrary to what many people believe, laissez-faire, but rather a state imposed market based economic system. Philip Mirowski has written the definitive description of the power of neoliberal ideas with his book: Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste.

Neoconservatism refers to US foreign policies enacted to enforce neoliberalism, specifically, the use of force to impose this grotesque economic system on the rest of the world. Neoconservatives believe that the United States can invade any country that goes against the diktat of the US, specifically any country that chooses an economic system contrary to neoliberalism. Since 9/11 we have been able to witness this neoconservative foreign policy in real time–Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, etc. Both Republican and Democratic foreign policies are controlled by neoconservatives. This is why the Obama administration has not been appreciably different in its foreign policy than the Bush administration. Neoconservatism is the military-industrial complex. Neoconservatism is the intelligence-industrial complex. Neoconservatism is the homeland security industrial complex--since 9/11.

Those are the differences.

The similarities between neoliberalism and neoconservatism is the consequence free outcome for the proponents of these noxious ideologies. Both neoconservatives and neoliberals have escaped any and all accountability in the aftermath of the disasters of the last decade. The neoconservatives walked away scot free after the criminal invasion of Iraq and the ongoing debacle that the War on Terror has become. The neoliberals wrecked the economy with the Wall Street crash, yet have emerged stronger that ever.

Both of these ideologies have escaped accountability, I believe, because both are immensely useful to the American empire–the deep state, that I’ve talked about before. Also, both neoconservatism and neoliberalism serve very powerful factions within the US and are held aloft by the greedy/ideology that both our political parties fully support.

Going forward, I’ll examine these two ideologies in much more detail, but at the present time it’s clear that these two factions are in complete control over our government policies, with no end in sight.

It’s their world, we just live in it.

 

 

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