The vandals took the handles

Posted on October 22, 2014 by camelotkidd

Reading the bizarre effort by Paul Krugman to portray Obama as a great president, it occurred to me that it all could have been different. Newly elected with a huge mandate for reform, Obama had a chance to break the stranglehold the financial industry had on our economy in the aftermath of the 2008 meltdown. He could have done it without bi-partisan Republican input or obstruction. And, it would have allowed him to have a successful presidency, rather than the disaster we have today.

Professor of Economics and Law, at University of Missouri, Kansas City, William Black, finds Krugman hagiography strange as well.

“As the scholar who has led the critique of the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute the elite (and not-so-elite) senior officers who led the three most destructive epidemics of accounting control fraud (appraisal fraud, liar’s loans, and fraudulent “reps and warranties” in secondary market sales) in history I can attest that Krugman could have quoted literally thousands of specific criticisms I have made about the failures to hold these senior bankers accountable.”

Holding the bankers that engaged in widespread fraud responsible would have provided the political space for Obama to implement a much more robust series of economic reforms.

Here’s Professor Black, explaining how this might have happened.

“It would have been more difficult for Obama to have pushed effectively to reduce income inequality, but there are concrete things he could have done that we urged. Note that by discrediting the banks and bankers through the actions I’ve just described above, the administration would have enormously increased the political space for real reforms on executive compensation. The single greatest source of the growth of inequality at the top is finance. Financial services compensation is grossly excessive, but it is also a leading source of the perverse incentives that drive our epidemics of accounting control fraud and are used to create “Gresham’s” dynamics in the professions and more junior officers and employees that aid and abet the financial frauds. Perverse executive compensation also provides the primary means by which controlling officers loot “their” firms in a manner that makes effective prosecution more difficult.”

Yeah, who knows, we could have even emerged with a different sort of economy, one that works for the rest of us, rather than just the 1%.

“The richest one percent of the world’s population now controls 48.2 percent of global wealth, up from 46 percent last year, according to the most recent global wealth report issued by Credit Suisse, the Swiss-based financial services company…The report found that the growth of global inequality has accelerated sharply since the 2008 financial crisis, as the values of financial assets have soared while wages have stagnated and declined…”

Also, by taking down the financial miscreants who crashed our economy we could have avoided the plague of austerity. Who has been at the forefront of the push to implement austerity in the aftermath of the crash? You know the answer–it has been the same people who should be in prison who have been the biggest cheerleaders for the mass suffering austerity has brought about.

The idea, at this late date, of a different Obama, is almost comical, I realize, but hear me out. If we are going to have better policies, we need to imagine them. There is, after all, an alternative to the neoliberal bullshit they’re foisting on us. Anyway, thinking about this reminded me of the essay Simon Johnson, wrote back in 2009, entitled the Quiet Coup. In the essay Johnson, former IMF chief economist, well described the lock on power the financial elite have on our country.

“The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.”

But, that’s not what we did, is it? We never broke the hold of the financial oligarchy and that inaction is what has defined the Obama Administration, despite what Paul Krugman might wish.

Here’s Johnson, describing what happens when you leave a powerful faction in power after they fuck up.

“…elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them….”

Why didn’t Obama take action against the financial industry, despite his historic appeal to Hope and Change? Lots of reasons: the financial industry was a significant campaign supporter, Obama had lots of friends who were bankers, but most importantly, I believe, is that Obama bought into the PR.

Obama didn’t take action because he believed, with all his heart, like other Washington insiders, “…that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.”

What would Simon Johnson tell the US as one of the nations he advised for the IMF?

“The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary…Johnson says the second thing the US needs to do is break up the oligarchy.”

Obama’s failure to prosecute the bankers who crashed the economy has consequences that reverberate. We can look around every day and see them.

 “The widening chasm between rich and poor is traceable to the policies that were adopted in 2008. That’s why things are so fu**ed up, it’s because the “surge in paper wealth, fueled by the trillions of dollars pumped into the financial system by central banks via zero interest rate and “quantitative easing” policies.”

As an allegorical device, finance can be thought of as a pump, getting capital to the economy as a whole. Finance, historically, has served the function of properly and efficiently allocating capital. But in the US it doesn’t work that way anymore. Finance has become an end to itself and is more concerned with speculation than allocating capital for productive economic activity.

“The pump don’t work ’cause the vandals took the handles.”

Update: You can’t make this shit up! Now the Justice Department is claiming that they couldn’t prosecute the vandals because they were “rocket scientists.”

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Godzilla vs Mothra

Posted on October 8, 2014 by camelotkidd

With  the dearth of investigative journalism and embrace of entertainment as news by our corporate press, sometimes the only way we learn about the important events shaping our world is when there is a dust up among our elite.

Right now we are privileged to have heavyweights within the financial industry duking it out in court. I’m referring to the AIG bailout case that began this week in Washington.

Luckily, there is a remnant of investigative writers out there, mostly on the internet. As author David Dayen writes “…regardless of the outcome, this trial should matter to every American. In fact, just in its first week, we’ve learned a lot of new information about how the bailout architects– then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, ex-Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, and former president of the New York Fed Timothy Geithner – conducted themselves amid the chaos of the financial crisis. And it doesn’t reflect well on any of them, with concealed information, bait-and-switches, and favorites played among financial institutions. As these three prepare to take the stand this week in the case, we should be pleased to finally have this debate about the bailout in public.”

Another bastion of investigative journalism is Naked Capitalism, whose beat is the world of finance. Founder of NC, Yves Smith, has been all over this case with two posts–part 1, and part 2, looking at all the documents that have come to light during the discovery phase of the trial. To me the salient point is one savvy analysts have long suspected: that the takeover of AIG by the government was initiated to hide all the losses of the Too Big to Fail Banks, who were AIG counter parties. Here’s Yves.

“AIG’s contention is that the driver of how its rescue was done was to force as many RMBS and CDO credit losses on AIG, so as to reduce the amount of support that would have to go directly to banks. In other words, it was to facilitate the bailout of the investment banks and banks that were perceived to be essential due to operating the payments system and large domestic and international over-the-counter debt markets. AIG could be handled more roughly because it was not a critical part of the financial plumbing and also had never done much to curry political favor. By contrast, if foreign investors were part of the rescue team, they would almost certainly have insisted on haircuts on the AIG credit default swaps, a large mechanism for laundering bailout dollars through AIG to banks and former investment banks like Goldman and Morgan Stanley.”

It’s simply amazing that 6 years after the bailout, we are just finding out these details. If you have any doubt that our elite feel they are above the law, follow this case, especially by reading Naked Capitalism, every day. Yves is having a fundraiser now, so if you’ve got some spare change, be sure to give a little to support all the great work she and her staff do.

And, no, I’m not calling our elite monsters, it’s just an analogy, silly. After all, they’re doing “God’s Work.”

* We also have whistleblowers to thank for a peek behind the curtain. Thanks Carmen Segarra. 

Update: Too funny. New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin is now telling us that this is old news, and that all the cool kids knew all about it.

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Why we can’t have nice stuff

Posted on October 6, 2014 by camelotkidd

We’ve been talking a lot about foreign policy lately, but why does US foreign policy matter to the American public?

It matters because our elite are committed to empire. Empire is their political economy.  Empire benefits them. Us, not so much.

Most Americans don’t want to be part of an empire and they also don’t want the hyper-militarized surveillance state that goes with empire. The American people, by and large, haven’t benefited by the enormous wealth generated by this arrangement of global hegemony, but have been terrorized by events and threats and red-alerts into thinking that a political decision was a historical necessity–or destiny.

But, as we have discussed previously, the US is largely controlled by a “deep state” composed of finance, energy and a military, industrial complex (MIC).

And, empire is very good for the bottom line of the MIC, as writer Tim Shorrock relates.

“70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget is spent on private contractors. Much of this spending – estimated at around $70 billion a year – winds up at the NSA, where SIGINT operations, particularly for collection and analysis, were heavily outsourced at the turn of the century.”

This article by Shorrock, reveals a window into the world of the MIC and how it is that empire is so profitable for a small group of corporations and individuals. Government spending that could benefit the vast majority of Americans, things like infrastructure refurbishment, or creating new “green jobs,” goes instead to empire.

That’s why we can’t have nice things.

If we want to have nice things, we need to dismantle empire.

Writer Chris Hedges, who has long warned of the dangers of our present arrangement, discusses what happens to empires that wage endless war.

“But endless war is not sustainable. States that wage endless war inevitably collapse. They drain their treasuries, are hated by the wretched of the earth, and militarize and strangle their political, social and cultural life while impoverishing and repressing their populations.” 

And, it’s not just about the economic aspects of empire. It’s also about raw power. We can’t have nice things in this country anymore because our elite have taken us back to a sort of neo-feudal milieu, where they are the lords and we the serfs. Here is Noam Chomsky describing the way the US is being dumbed down to bring this about.

“People must come to believe that suffering and deprivation result from the failure of individuals, not the reigning socioeconomic system. There are huge industries devoted to this task. About one-sixth of the entire US economy is devoted to what’s called “marketing,” which is mostly propaganda. Advertising is described by analysts and the business literature as a process of fabricating wants – a campaign to drive people to the superficial things in life, like fashionable consumption, so that they will remain passive and obedient.”

Chris Hedges rages against this neo-feudalistic turn and describes what needs to happen.

“We too are powerless. We have undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. It is over. They have won. If we want to wrest power back, to make the consent of the governed more than an empty cliché, we will have to mobilize, to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience to overthrow—let me repeat that word for the members of Homeland Security who may be visiting us this afternoon—overthrow the corporate state.”

Let’s get started.

Update: Way more from Ian Welsh–

Why We Live In a Shitty Economy for Most People

 

 

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Greedy/Ideology

Posted on September 22, 2014 by camelotkidd

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

When Karl Rove gave that memorable quote to Ron Suskind, in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, the Bush Administration was chock full of smug neoconservatives who were at the height of their hubris.

How things change. The US may be an empire but, as events since that statement have demonstrated, we’re not a particularly competent or benign one.

Tom Engelhardt, writing at Tom Dispatch since 9/11, has made it his mission to illustrate just how bad we are at empire.

“Nowhere is there a hint of Washington’s Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East, no less globally.  In fact, across a vast and growing swath of the planet, stretching from South Asia to Africa, from Iraq to Ukraine, the main force at work seems not to be the concentration of power, but its fragmentation, its disintegration, before which Washington has proven remarkably helpless.”

Why is that?

Greedy-Ideology, that’s why.

We can’t do empire competently because our “history making” elites are in thrall to ideology and to greed: the spawn of free-market magic thinking and the old-fashioned American desire to make a buck.

So, we make an ungodly hash of interdiction and nation-building, even humanitarian intervention.

Let’s examine the invasion and occupation of Iraq to observe this greedy-ideology in action.

After the invasion, rather than heed the military and academic experts who advocated a large occupation bureaucracy, we opted for lean oversight courtesy of the neocons who don’t believe in government. Then we decided to disband the Iraqi army because as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld so memorably put it, freedom is untidy, and outsourced the whole security thing to for-profit contractors, like Blackwater. And we know how that worked out.

But, and here’s where it gets nuanced and well, ugly. Empire does work for a segment of the US. Let’s call them, oh, I don’t know, the one percent. For them, the political economy of empire has been working rather well. The beneficiaries of empire includes: finance, the oil and gas industry and the military, industrial complex, with high-tech along for the ride. Examining these sectors, we can see that even as they bobble the maintenance of empire in a manner that even average, unengaged Americans can’t ignore, they personally benefit. Even as our imperial management fails and our clients fragment and our control disintegrates, our elites are becoming  fabulously wealthy.

I’m obliged, it seems, to paraphrase President Eisenhower yet again:  “The danger comes not from commerce itself, but from the extraordinary concentration of wealth and power that has accrued in recent decades to corporations and their Wall Street investors.” 

The vast inequality that has built up here in this country is a direct result of the political economy of empire that enriches certain segments of the power elite. Unfortunately, the US empire is subject to the same force that’s decimating the rest of America: looting, as far as the eye can see. I refer you to a seminal paper by economists George Akerlof and Paul Romer describing the perverse incentives that allow elites to run a firm-or an empire-into the ground while they personally benefit.  Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.

Our theoretical analysis shows that an economic underground can come to life if firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society’s expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success). Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations.

Indeed, I propose that looting is enabled by greed and ideology as a general truism. And it’s not just a phenomenon relegated to empire. Look around and you will start to observe looting everywhere.

Last week we discussed a compelling and disturbing article by Matt Stoller at Naked Capitalism, about the ramifications of recent US foreign policy. As Stoller relates, we’ve never had an adult conversation in this country about empire. Instead we’ve been treated to, censorship and propaganda.

“As we’ve by now noticed, America has been on a glide path of dishonest policy-making since 9/11. One can imagine a different way of doing this. Imagine if the public had known that it was elements of the Saudi government who actually supported this attack. Imagine if they knew of the incredibly tight intertwining of Saudi elites with US elites, the Saudi extra-constitutional slush fund, petrodollar terrorism diplomacy, the long alliance with theocracy, and so forth. There would have had to be a reckoning for this mess of contradictions. Perhaps the public would have endorsed this deal. Perhaps the public would have accepted cheap gasoline in return for, as Ken Silverstein calls it, “The Secret World of Oil.” Rick Perlstein, in the book The Invisible Bridge, showed how the public tried to reckon with Vietnam, but then decided to turn away from truth in the 1970s, and to Ronald Reagan’s narrative of an America without flaws or limits. Perhaps that’s what would have happened, again, after 9/11.

But the public never got the chance for a reckoning. As in the 1970s, we never got a chance to understand the real costs of our geopolitical arrangements, and to examine alternatives. That was left to the fringes, for another ten years or so. Instead, what happened was a mixture of propaganda and censorship.”

The American public has not been given a chance for a reckoning, I suspect, because the nature of our empire and the small group it benefits, would have thereby become apparent which is, of course, that which Shall Not Happen.

Here is Yves Smith, the host of Naked Capitalism, commenting on the likely effects of the political economy of empire.

“(Stoller) calls for more open discussion of the US foreign policy and the ever-rising cost and increased difficulty of maintaining our empire. Unfortunately, that also means looking at the implications of life with more costly oil. There are far too many powerful people who stand to lose if that were to come into play faster than it absolutely has to, which means propaganda and dissimulation are likely to continue to be the order of the day.”

Bingo.

If we the people want to address any of the horrific disasters coming down the pike–global warming being the most obvious– then we must confront the American empire, what it exists for and whom it benefits.

Otherwise, greedy-ideology will triumph.

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That time of year

Posted on September 17, 2014 by camelotkidd

Uh, oh. It’s after Labor Day and our political leaders are pining for war.

Put away those whites and get out the camouflage.

It’s funny what our leaders admit to when they think no one is paying attention. Remember the run up to the Iraq War in 2002 and how Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, confessed that you needed to wait to September to sell war to the American people.

”From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

Just remember that statement–war is viewed by our leaders as a just another product to be marketed to the American people.

Of course, the media is also beating the war drums. Charles Pierce at Esquire catches them at it on the Sunday shows, and relates the pro-war dynamic in his uniquely humorous fashion.

“Translation from the original weaselspeak: we’ve scared the rubes again, and we got the White House to go along with it, so this “ending all these wars” business has been put to bed.”

That’s exactly right. The corporate media has been unrelenting in their efforts to drum up enthusiasm for war amid a general war weariness among the American people. Assisting in this effort has been a parade of retired generals and think tank warriors, who bray for more attacks and more military spending. Left unsaid on these cable TV shows has been who these retired generals represent.

“Ramping up America’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political and sectarian conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.”

Matt Stoller, former senior policy analyst for Congressman Alan Grayson, explains how we got to this point, where the American people can be so easily stampeded into another war.

“The gist of the problem is that Americans have been lied to for years about our foreign policy, and these lies have now created binding policy constraints on our leaders which make it impossible to eliminate groups like ISIS.”

Read Matt’s entire article at Naked Capitalism. It’s a superb portrayal of the inherent contradictions of US foreign policy, and more importantly, not an analysis that you will read anywhere else. I will be writing much more on this subject in an upcoming post.

 

 

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Don’t do stupid shit

Posted on September 9, 2014 by camelotkidd

What the fuck is going on in the Ukraine? And why does the US seem hell bent on starting a nuclear war over an area that has no relevance to it’s national security?

Talk about stupid shit.

According to conventional wisdom, the crisis in the Ukraine is all the fault of Russia and their aggressive leader Putin, who is attempting to recreate the glory of the Soviet empire.

University of Chicago, professor of political science, John Mearsheimer, claims that this view is at odds with reality. (Yes, it’s the same professor who, along with professor Stephen Walt, took on the the Israel lobby in 2006)

“According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.”

Yes, yes. We discussed how the US has been relentless in its drive to isolate Russia as it pivots to the Pacific, in Who Contained Who. But, why Ukraine, and why the sudden ferocity?

Investigative reporter Robert Parry, who reported on the US involvement in Central America during the Reagan Administration, and the Iran-Contra connection, has been all over this story. Parry claims that the conflict in the Ukraine is driven by a combination of factors including: US designs on Ukrainian natural gas, US control over markets and US protection of the petro-dollar.

“So, clearly energy resources and the billions of dollars that go with them should be factored in when trying to solve the mystery of why Official Washington has gone so berserk about a confrontation with Russia that boils down to whether ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine should be allowed some measure of autonomy or be put firmly under the thumb of U.S.-friendly authorities in Kiev.

There’s also the issue of Russia’s interest in exploring with China and other emerging economies the possibility of escaping the financial hegemony of the U.S. dollar, a move that could seriously threaten American economic dominance. According to this line of thinking, the U.S. and its close allies need to bring Moscow to its geopolitical knees – where it was under the late Boris Yeltsin – to stop any experimentation with other currencies for global trade.”

Parry also factors in the role of US neoconservative ideology.

“So, while it’s reasonable to see multiple motives behind the brinksmanship with Russia over Ukraine, the sheer recklessness of the confrontation has, to me, the feel of an ideology or an “ism,” where people are ready to risk it all for some larger vision that is central to their being.

Still, ideology will only take you so far. This is the US of A where greed always walks hand in hand with ideology. As I always say, qui bono? The oil and gas industry, financed by Wall Street, sure has a lock on US foreign policy.

When you get down to the dirty, nitty-gritty of this, we’re ready to fuck up our water supply in this country so the oil and gas industry, financed by Wall Street, awash with ZIRP funding from the Fed, can make a killing. All so we can wean Europe off of that evil commie gas.

I mean, why the fuck not? We deeply contaminated parts of our county in the quest for uranium and plutonium weapons to fight the Soviets. Why shouldn’t we fuck up the rest of the country in our effort to battle the Ruskies?

There it is. The method to understand US foreign policy is: greedy-ideology. You heard it here first.

Oh, and read all of Parry’s article. First rate. His exploration of Vice-President Biden’s son Hunter’s involvement with a Ukrainian gas corporation shines a light on the connection between the business and policy.

So why doesn’t anyone else see this state of affairs for what it is?

American benevolence seems a prime candidate for this lack of understanding US foreign policy. That’s where this, don’t do stupid shit, meme comes from. It’s impossible for America to be evil, only stupid. Conventional wisdom says that America is a good faith actor  trying to help the world achieve peace and prosperity and apple pie. But, as we have discussed here Ad nauseam, conventional wisdom is fucked. To be perfectly frank, there isn’t better propaganda than American benevolence.

Just to repeat, the US has a deep state whose goal is world dominance through empire, and it’s not trying to do good, but evil. See–Not a Bug, but a Feature.

On that dark note, here is commentator Bangor commenting at Naked Capitalism, about the mindset of our rulers.

” It’s not, like many believe, that American policy makers are stupid or don’t understand the issues–they aren’t and they understand the issues very well–they just can’t propose policies that would get them fired or killed (to be perfectly blunt–when billions and trillions are on the line the oligarchs don’t f-around, and why people don’t understand that essential aspect of power shows the stunning power of propaganda).”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Deep State Blues

Posted on September 5, 2014 by camelotkidd

I have the “deep state” blues. Reading the speech President Obama gave in Estonia it’s clear that the neoconservatives, who were such a feature of the the Bush Administration, are still calling the shots. It appears that it doesn’t matter who we elect, Republicans or Democrats, we get the neoconservative “deep state.”

Former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren is the latest insider to alert us to this political reality. Lofgren alleges that a deep state rules no matter the party in power. His essay, taken from his book, The Party is Over, is a powerful indictment on the way our government really operates. Because of the seriousness of Lofgren’s charges, I’m going to include this really long quote.

“Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Justice Department. We also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions, and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater.

It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a government salaryman.

The Deep State is the big story of our time; it is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction.”

This story of our time is not being discussed. If you happen to mention this idea to friends of family prepare to be labeled a conspiracy theorist or worse. Going forward, I won’t be surprised if the US, like the former Soviet Union, starts locking people up in mental wards for discussing these sorts of topics.

I better get myself fitted for my very own custom straight jacket.

 

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Dr. Sunstein, we have a problem

Posted on August 23, 2014 by camelotkidd

What does it take to be a good American? Should we follow our elites and trust that they know best, or should we question and criticize official explanations?

I’m reading historian Rick Perlstein’s latest–“The Invisible Bridge,” where he examines this question in relation to the tumult of the 1970’s America, and the rise of Ronald Reagan. As Perlstein asks: “What does it mean to truly believe in America? To wave a flag? Or to struggle toward a more searching alternative to the shallowness of the flag-wavers—to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent?”

This divergence in how we, as Americans, should properly behave as as citizens, has become the cultural, racial and political divide that continues today.

Perlstein, one of America’s best historians, has been over this ground before. In Before The Storm, and Nixonland, Perlstein illustrated how cultural and racial tensions of the 1960’s were used cynically by conservatives as a way to gain and hold political power. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, woman’s rights, and Vietnam were all issues of the day that divided Americans between those who thought we should trust our leaders and the government and those who saw the whole system as a sham and advocated for fundamental change. Think of Civil Rights protests leading to the race riots or protests against the Vietnam War segueing into the Weathermen bombing and you have an idea how this transformation fundamentally divided Americans.

Divide and rule is as old as the hills and has been used by elites for centuries as a way to maintain power. In the US because of our history of chattel slavery, race has long been the cudgel that has been used to divide the working classes. The Southern Strategy, articulated by Republican advisor, Lee Atwater, lays out the way that Republicans responded to the Civil Rights Act.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

The ongoing protests in Ferguson, Missouri reminds me of the famous Faulkner quote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Salon writer Andrew O’Hehir makes the same point as Perlstein, in talking about the ongoing pernicious effects of race on America.

“An entire right-wing ideological empire remains devoted to convincing white people that benefit-sucking African-Americans and job-stealing Latino immigrants are somehow to blame for their downward trajectory. White privilege is the solvent used, throughout American history, to dissolve multiracial coalitions of working people, and the drug used to brainwash whites into making common cause with the class of CEOs, financiers and landlords.”

Like Perlstein, I fervently believe in critical examination of US policies, rather than relying   on assurances of elites in the essential goodness of America. We have so many problems facing us as a nation and its crucial we comprehend how we got here.

However, this idea of critical thinking poses problems for our elites in their quest to “manufacture consent.”

As noted linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky has noted, every government, no matter how despotic, requires a modicum of consent from the populace. Furthermore, according to Chomsky, the more democratic a government, the more it relies on propaganda to achieve this consent. In advanced democracies, like the United States, sophisticated propaganda, like the New York Times and Washington Post, is aimed at at elite economic and political decision makers. For the masses, there’s the NFL, Nascar and Fox News. You know, bread and circuses.

The Obama Administration is no different than the Bush Administration in their quest to control information and manufacture consent. The idea that government ought to control what Americans believe was well articulated by Dr. Cass Sunstein, Obama confidant and Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Dr. Sunstein argues that conspiracy theories and disbelieving Americans are preventing the government from being able to govern effectively.

Constitutional scholar and journalist Glen Greenwald, condemns this effort by Dr. Sunstein to control American public opinion.

In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. 

Of course, this idea was articulated at the beginning of Obama’s presidency and things have changed.

I ask everyone I know–Do you believe anything the US government tells you, in light of all the falsehoods that have been revealed? Aluminum tubes, anyone?

According to Dutch journalist Karel Van Wolferen, you shouldn’t.

“America’s history, since the demise of the Soviet Union, of truly breathtaking lies: on Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Venezuela, Libya and North Korea; its record of overthrown governments; its black-op and false flag operations; and its stealthily garrisoning of the planet with some thousand military bases, is conveniently left out of consideration.”

Journalist Glen Greenwald has been a thorn in the side of first the Bush and now the Obama Administration’s penchant for secrecy, and has taken steps to expose the lies inherent. It was this reason that Edward Snowden trusted him in his release of NSA secrets. Greenwald offers the best response to people like Dr. Sunstein, who advocate for more trust.

“Who is it who relentlessly spread “false conspiracy theories” of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba’athist/Al-Qaeda alliance — the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation?  And who is it who demonized as “conspiracy-mongers” people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government?  The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources:  namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.”

Exactly. American history since the Kennedy Assassination has been replete with examples of government lies and stories denigrated as conspiracy theories that later turned out to be true. Think of the Gulf of Tonkin justification for war in Vietnam, or the story of Nixon sabotaging peace talks so he could win election in 1968.

As Greenwald says, there’s a good reason why American distrust and loath their government.

“It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein’s desire to use covert propaganda to “undermine” anti-government speech so repugnant.  The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned — rationally — to distrust government actions and statements.  Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is.  In other words, people don’t trust the Government and “conspiracy theories” are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.”

 

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I Hate Bullies

Posted on August 5, 2014 by camelotkidd

I hate bullies, always have. This is a big reason for my adversarial writing, especially about US economic and foreign policies. As a empire in terminal decline, the US has become the biggest bully in the world. The illegal invasion of Iraq, torture and NSA spying all have contributed to this perception of a bully lashing out in frustration. The election of Barack Obama brought hope of change, but if anything, he has been worse than Bush, with his extrajudicial drone assassinations and neo-conservative foreign policy of regime change. Think Honduras, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, etc. It has become manifestly apparent to the rest of the world that US bullying continues in spite of the soaring rhetoric of freedom and democracy. As my momma said–an ounce of action beats a ton of words.

The US’s only competitor is Israel. Their latest attack on Gaza is driving this point home with a vengeance. Veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn, well describes this dynamic.

“By its actions, Israel has put the Palestinian issue firmly back on the international agenda from which it had largely disappeared since the Arab uprisings of 2011. Only a few months ago, a friend sympathetic to the Palestinians lamented to me that, in his travels in the US, Europe and the Arab world, he had seldom heard the words “Palestine” or “Palestinians”. Gaza, at horrendous cost to its people, has changed all that.”

Israeli actions are widely viewed by the rest of the world as those of a brutal occupying power and a petulant bully taking out his anger on the defenseless civilian population of Gaza.

It is a violation of international law to destroy civilian infrastructure and lives if there is no concrete military advantage in doing so. “Israel is repeatedly and flagrantly violating the law of armed conflict,” a group of international legal scholars said in a statement released this week. “Most of the recent heavy bombings in Gaza lack an acceptable military justification and, instead, appear to be designed to terrorize the civilian population.

Israel is a colonial power, that got its start in 1948 by expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from its present territory. As a result of the 1967 war, Israel gained control of the West Bank (from Jordan), the Gaza Strip (from Egypt) and the Golan Heights (from Syria). Since the  1967 war Israel has also served as a key enforcer of US Middle East policy. They help the US control this region with its stupendous resources of oil and gas.

As Bashir Abu-Manneh explains imperialism-colonialism.

“The United States has been determining major economic and political outcomes in the Middle East since at least 1967, with Israel continuing to play a crucial role in their realization. In Israel-Palestine, this has meant that force and colonial peace have alternated as main instruments of policy, with the main objective being a constant: Jewish supremacy in Palestine—as much land as possible, as few Palestinians as possible. The United States has exploited this Zionist imperative for its own interests in the region, and has fostered a militarized and fundamentalist Israel in the process.”

John Judidis makes the case that the latest conflict in Gaza is brought about by this colonial behavior, most specifically the crippling blockade.

“Israel is one of the world’s last colonial powers, and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are its unruly subjects. Like many past anti-colonial movements, Hamas and Fatah are deeply flawed and have sometimes poorly represented their peoples, and sometimes unnecessarily provoked the Israelis and used tactics that violate the rules of war. But the Israeli government has continued to expand settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and to rule harshly over its subjects, while maintaining a ruinous blockade on Gaza. That’s the historical backdrop to the events now taking place.”

This bullying behavior is directly subsidized by the US, who provides Israel with 3 billion in aid, of which the vast majority consists of military aid. US Congressional leaders are particularly subservient to Israel.

The US Senate just passed not one but now two resolutions by unanimous consent declaring its backing of Israel’s deadly attacks on and invasion of Gaza.

Of course, US members of Congress are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier.

Lindsey Graham compares Hamas to al Qaeda. On Fox News, the South Carolina senator said that he wants “the world to know who Hamas is.” But in the same appearance, Graham took viewers a step back from understanding who Hamas is by saying that the group is “a terrorist organization who wants for Israel what Al Qaeda wants for us.”

There is a comparison between Hamas and Al Qaeda but not the one Lindsey Graham thinks there is. Both Al Qaeda and Hamas are creations of US and Israeli intelligence agencies as a way to counteract indigenous nationalism in the Middle East.

Robert Dreyfuss, in Devil’s Game, makes the case that much of the so called war on terror, is blowback from our own creations. “Dreyfuss discusses how the West used Islamic radicalism to suppress Communist movements in the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world. He provides a comprehensive review of the support of Western governments for the Mujahadeen and Jihadi Islamic fighters, who were trained and sent into Afghanistan. With the close support and advice of CIAparamilitaries, these Islamic jihadists helped defeat Soviet forces in Afghanistan. “The author also discusses how the Israeli government supported the growth of Hamas as a tool to fight the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO was always viewed as the major threat to Israel, because they were the more educated and secular Palestinians.

Gaza can be thought of as a giant open air prison, and Israel’s latest attack can be thought of as putting down a prison riot–kind of like Attica, with tanks and F-16’s. Israel even has a doctrine to describe their collective punishment– the Dahiye Doctrine,

“Israel has to employ tremendous force disproportionate to the magnitude of the enemy’s actions. The intent of this… is to harm the civilian population to such an extent that it will bring pressure to bear on the enemy combatants.Furthermore, this policy is intended to create deterrence regarding future attacks against Israel, through the damage and destruction of civilian and military infrastructures which necessitate long and expensive reconstruction actionswhich would crush the will of those who wish to act against Israel.” (emphasis added)

Both the US and Israel have right-wing reactionary forces to thank for their bullying foreign policies. Both the US and Israel have been affected by policies crafted by a small cadre of neo-conservatives, with significant overlap between them.

“Not long ago some of these “neoconservatives” wrote position papers for Israeli politicians. Now they are occupying a growing number of top-level and mid-level positions in the US government. They seem to consider Israeli interests synonomous with American interests. Most American policy experts disagree.”

The neo conservatives not only share ideas, they even use the same media spin, written by the same Goebbels look alike–Frank Luntz.

There is a reason for this enhancement of the PR skills of Israeli spokesmen. Going by what they say, the playbook they are using is a professional, well-researched and confidential study on how to influence the media and public opinion in America and Europe. Written by the expert Republican pollster and political strategist Dr Frank Luntz, the study was commissioned five years ago by a group called The Israel Project, with offices in the US and Israel, for use by those “who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”.

Luckily, more Americans are starting to recognize this bullying behavior for what it is, especially young people.  

“A recent report in the Washington Post noted that “A new Pew Research Center poll is the second in the past week to show a huge generational split on the current conflict in Gaza. While all age groups north of 30 years old clearly blame Hamas more than Israel for the current violence, young adults buck the trend in a big way. Among 18 to 29-year olds, 29 percent blame Israel more for the current wave of violence, while 21 percent blame Hamas.”

It will be interesting going forward if more Americans recognize that we’re an empire in decline. The US was never perfect, but we used to lead with a more robust mixture of soft power. Now, it’s all hard power, with the military/intelligence complex taking the leading role. Neither political party nor the corporate media are even discussing this looming reality. It’s still–“America, Fuck Yeah!”

The reality is that this turn towards hard power is making us less and less safe. After all, who likes bullies?

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Who Contained Who?

Posted on July 13, 2014 by camelotkidd

In light of US foreign policy since 9/11, perhaps a reassessment of official Cold War history is in order. This reassessment is vitally important because the US has used the pretext of the war on terror as a means to maintain a Cold War level of militarism. And now, in a disturbing but not surprising turn of events, a new Cold War with Russia and China is brewing.

The reassessment* I’m proposing is that the central premise of containment, where the US contained the Soviet Union is wrong. It wasn’t the US containing the Soviets but vice-versa.

Crazy, when you think about it like that, isn’t it?

Let’s test the hypothesis. Did US foreign policy change when the Soviet Union ceased being the evil empire? Is anything, US foreign policy became more expansionist with the Soviets no longer containing us. Continuing with this idea, the great challenge posed by the Soviet Union’s containment for US planners was that it placed the communist controlled parts of the world off limits to capitalist penetration in the search for resources, cheap labor and markets. Communism effectively contained the American empire from expanding into certain areas of the world.

The present conflict in the Ukraine is where we can see the clearest indication of this reversal of the containment meme. According to Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria (fuck the EU!) Nuland, the US has spent $5 billion dollars since the Orange Revolution in a quest to bring about regime change and to wrench Ukraine away from traditional trading partner–Russia. And this all comes after two decades of steady eastward expansion by the US and NATO into eastern Europe, despite promises of neutrality for the region.

“Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its Nato Enlargement Project. Reneging on a promise made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand “one inch to the east”, Nato has, in effect, militarily occupied eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucasus, Nato’s expansion is the biggest military build-up since the Second World War.”

The conflict in the Ukraine is also where we can glimpse the US corporate media, functioning much like an official propaganda system, expertly parroting official US foreign policy dispatches. In complete inversion of reality, Putin and Russia are depicted as the aggressor–Invading Crimea and threatening all of Europe with their evil bellicosity. And the US? Why, just like during the Cold War, bravely confronting an evil empire bent on world conquest, and encouraging nascent democracies.

Any sort of Cold War reassessment would be met with ferocious resistance. For starters, the Cold War was invaluable as a domestic political weapon against labor. Think of Joseph McCarthy and the post WWII Red Scare. Think its a coincidence that Taft/Hartley, the anti-labor legislation, passed in this super charged atmosphere? And what about all that action by the US in the Third World supporting murderous dictators, all in the name of containing communism? If the Soviets were containing us, how does that look?

It wouldn’t look good at all. In fact the latest scandal de-jour, of Latin American children attempting to enter the US, has its roots in these Cold War policies of supporting brutal right-wing governments in Central America, all in the name of containing communism.

“Devastated by Reagan’s terrorist war against the region, thousands of Central Americans traveled north to escape the violence of US-backed death squads.”

A reassessment of the Cold War would also expose some dark truths about the class conflict that’s ongoing in America. Turning to 20th century American history a pattern is discernible. Whenever working people and labor achieves any gains, the result is a new Red Scare. We already mentioned the post WWII one, but the justification given about the evil Soviets poised to invade was false. The real reason was the New Deal. The owners were desperate to put labor back in its place after the war, and the Cold War was a great pretext. But, there was an earlier Red Scare, that took place post WWI. The Progressive Era of the early 20th century combined with labor militancy needed to be nipped in the bud. And under progressive hero Woodrow Wilson it was. What about recent events? I remember the Battle in Seattle and a growing awareness of the effects of globalized capitalism on working people. The War on Terror, post 9-11, with its hyper-militarism and patriotically correct censorship put an end to that.

Hopefully this reexamination of Cold War history will demonstrate the linkage between foreign and domestic policies that have devastated working class peoples to the advantage of the 1%. The history since the end of the Cold War provides an objective lesson. With the Soviet Union and communist parties no longer able to contain the US, the free market has been allowed to run wild.

Margaret Thatcher laid out the brutal reality with her admonishment that–“There is no alternative.”

*See Noam Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy for much more on this subject

 

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