Not a Bug but a Feature

Posted on June 26, 2014 by camelotkidd

Watching the media coverage of  jihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) rampaging across Iraq has been like a flashback to 2003. There’s Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Feith, invited on the “serious” news shows to share their expertise. As Esquire blogger, Charles Pierce has colorfully written–these experts should be interviewed only with the permission of the warden.

More salient to our discussion than this parade of idiots and criminals has been the depressingly shallow examination of US foreign policy. The US media, with its proclivity for balance, has taken the stance of reporting what partisans on either side of the political divide are saying. And, of course, both Democrats and Republicans are lining up to blame the other side.

The Republicans, to no ones surprise, are blaming it all on President Obama for leaving Iraq in 2011 and allowing the place to go to hell. Oh, and Benghazi.

The Democrats place the blame on the Bush Administration’s invasion and subsequent policies of occupation.

I believe there’s the much more sinister interpretation. The US, like empires before it, is pursuing a divide and rule strategy in the Middle East.

In 2003 the US invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. After easily overthrowing Saddam and occupying the country, the US was faced with a brutal insurgency primarily led by Sunni that was averaging 100 attacks a day on US troops.

Saddam was a Sunni and the head of the Ba’ath party of Iraq. His overthrow brought about a Shia dominated government led presently by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Iran was an obvious beneficiary of this turn of events.  However, US middle-eastern allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar were incensed with this turn of events as they view Iran and the Shia as the ultimate enemy.

“In this context, contradictory US policies appear to make sense. In early 2005, Pakistani defense sources revealed that the Pentagon had “resolved to arm small militias backed by US troops and entrenched in the population,” consisting of “former members of the Ba’ath Party” – linked up with al-Qaeda insurgents – to “head off” the threat of a “Shi’ite clergy-driven religious movement.” Almost simultaneously, the Pentagon began preparing its ‘Salvador option’ to sponsor Shi’ite death squads to “target Sunni insurgents and their sympathisers.”

The strategic thinking behind arming both sides was alluded to by one US Joint Special Operations University report which said: “US elite forces in Iraq turned to fostering infighting among their Iraqi adversaries on the tactical and operational level.” This included disseminating and propagating al-Qaeda jihadi activities by “US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists” to fuel “factional fighting” and “to set insurgents battling insurgents.”

This short-sighted divide-and-rule strategy went nowhere within Iraq beyond fueling sectarianism, but has played out across the region.”

You might also recall that funding, training and arming Sunni terrorists has been a key tenet of US foreign policy since the Mujahideen. And that in Syria, right next door to Iraq, we are arming, training and supporting these Sunni terrorists in a campaign against President Bashar al-Assad, a Shia.

And guess what? These very same Sunni terrorists are ISIS, (remember the name?) who are rampaging across Iraq.

“I think we have to understand first how we got here. We have been arming ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) in Syria. ISIS, an al Qaeda offshoot, has been collaborating with the Syrian rebels whom the Obama administration has been arming in their efforts to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.” – Senator Rand Paul, Interview CNN

Confused?

I don’t blame you. This sounds like the biggest clusterfuck ever. However, there is always a plan in the Empire of Chaos.

“The US made every effort to fuel sectarian animosities to divert attention from the attacks on US soldiers. And due to a savage and deceptive counterinsurgency plan that employed death squads, torture, assassinations, and massive ethnic cleansing, they succeeded in confusing Iraqis as to who was really behind the daily atrocities, the human rights violations and the mountain of carnage.”

All these policies are not making the American people any safer. On the contrary, these policies, like previous ones, are designed to enrich the rulers of our country, the 1% and the corporations they control. Especially the oil companies.

“The oppressive United States occupation was racked with insurgency precisely because it tried to harness the country’s vast oil revenues to its imperial designs in the Middle East.” 

American foreign policy, in this regard, is no different from American economic policy. These policies are designed for the 1%. The rest of us are an afterthought.

The key to understanding the financial crash or terrorists running wild is all about understanding the paradigm.

These disastrous policies are not a bug but a feature.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Feral Elite

Posted on March 14, 2014 by camelotkidd

What happens when you look forward instead of backward and refuse to hold your elite accountable for disastrous policy decisions and crimes?

You get feral elite. They’re running wild, breeding with other feral elite. It’s a real problem.

Our financial elite wrecked our economy with their witches brew of mortgage backed security crap, then engineered a trillion dollar government bailout. Are they grateful? Hah! They’ve moved on and are busy lecturing us about how they are doing Gods work, while advocating cuts to social programs like Medicare and Social Security. Of course they haven’t quit their day job of looting our economy.

In an article entitled, The Rent is Too Damn High, Enrique Diaz-Alvarez, makes a strong case that the entire financial sector, not just Goldman Sachs, really is just like the vampire squid famously described by Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi.

“For every dollar that our capital stock increases, finance collects somewhere between two and four dollars! Old Soviet bureaucrats with their chauffeured Ladas and modest three-bedroom apartments never dreamed of achieving this level of parasitism.“

The US foreign policy elite wasted trillions of dollars invading Afghanistan and Iraq, killing and displacing millions in a tragically inept war on terror. The perpetrators and their media cheerleaders are unapologetic, busy advocating more wars. And, to add insult to injury, lecturing other countries on proper behavior. Here’s Secretary of State Kerry, the very same one who, as a US Senator, voted to invade Iraq, scolding Russia.

“[Y]ou just don’t invade another country on a phony pretext in order to assert your interests.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The hypocrisy is simply stunning.

Our elite intelligence officials tortured people to death, set up a world wide gulag of hidden prisons and destroyed whatever was left of our reputation to uphold international law and respect human rights. Once again, nobody was held responsible for this criminal behavior, in fact, President Obama named one of the chief perpetrators–John Brennan–to be head of the CIA. And how did that work out? Wonderful. Now the spooks responsible for this crime have been caught spying on the Senate committee responsible for oversight.

“In recent months, it has emerged that the CIA has been spying on investigators from the Senate intelligence committee – the very committee charged with overseeing the CIA. The investigators, who were authorised to examine CIA documents relating to interrogation methods, found a withering internal review which concluded with the finding that torture techniques, like waterboarding, used in “black site” prisons had been ineffective. This was particularly troublesome because the CIA director had argued the opposite before the committee, contradicting the agency’s own findings. When the CIA discovered that the investigators had the review, it started going through their computer logs to find out how they had got hold of it.”

When you maintain a bifurcated rule of law and maintain a class of feral elite you end up rewarding sociopaths and psychopaths who do sociopathic things, and make psychopathic statements. And, when you reward a feral elite the press glorifies them and justifies their behavior. Read the New York Times Deal Book and see what I mean.

This sociopathic/psychopathic behavior is especially prevalent in corporate America. Writer Alan Deutchman, asks a provocative question. Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

“There’s evidence that the business climate has become even more hospitable to psychopaths in recent years. In pioneering long-term studies of psychopaths in the workplace, Babiak focused on a half-dozen unnamed companies: One was a fast-growing high-tech firm, and the others were large multinationals undergoing dramatic organizational changes — severe downsizing, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures. That’s just the sort of corporate tumult that has increasingly characterized the U.S. business landscape in the last couple of decades. And just as wars can produce exciting opportunities for murderous psychopaths to shine (think of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic), Babiak found that these organizational shake-ups created a welcoming environment for the corporate killer. “The psychopath has no difficulty dealing with the consequences of rapid change; in fact, he or she thrives on it,” Babiak claims. ‘Organizational chaos provides both the necessary stimulation for psychopathic thrill seeking and sufficient cover for psychopathic manipulation and abusive behavior.'”

Rewarding sociopathic and psychopathic behavior has resulted in a dangerous, self perpetuating cycle. We have, on a national level, created a Gresham’s dynamic, where bad behavior is driving out good. As a vivid example of this dynamic, US Attorney General Holder basically admitted that our largest banks are now too big to jail. Who says that crime doesn’t pay?

“Because if now, as the senior member of a bank, or the board of a bank, I know that there are no criminal penalities for breaking the rules, don’t I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders to actually play fast and loose? Because if I get caught, that’s just the cost of doing business? I know it’s a frightening thought, but if carried to its logical extreme—if truly people believe that because of their size, they can’t be prosecuted, it actually brings forth a new issue of moral hazard extreme: illegal behavior. That’s why equality under the law is an important concept – one that is being violated now.”

How does all this end?

Not well. Journalist Chris Hedges interviews economic historian Avner Offer, who offers a grim warning.

“Offer, the author of “The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950,” for 25 years has explored the cavernous gap between our economic and social reality and our ruling economic ideology. Neoclassical economics, he says, is a “just-world theory,” one that posits that not only do good people get what they deserve but those who suffer deserve to suffer. He says this model is “a warrant for inflicting pain.” If we continue down a path of mounting scarcities, along with economic stagnation or decline, this neoclassical model is ominous. It could be used to justify repression in an effort to sustain a vision that does not correspond to the real world.”

And guess what? There’s no progressive savior coming to rescue us. After 5 years of President Obama, that ship has sailed.

No, it’s up to us. If we are going to neuter our feral elite and rescue our country it will have to be a DIY operation.

Let’s get started.

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Democracy Inc.

Posted on January 25, 2014 by camelotkidd

I’ve talked before how neoliberalism is leading inexorably to new type of power relationship that I’ve labeled neofeudalism. The evidence of this new relationship is all around us: record unemployment, outrageous student loans, dangerous chemical spills, and rampant inequality.

Americans also are starting to recognize the outlines of this new order. And they aren’t happy.

According to a new poll, 65% of American citizens are dissatisfied with how our system of government works. These people know something is wrong. They can look around and see with their own eyes that the goods and services they use are more expensive and that their salaries and wages are flat or sinking. They wonder if they will still have a job next month. And, increasingly, they worry that their children will face an even worse future.

I hear a variation of this story every day from my friends and co-workers.

Princeton political science professor Sheldon Wolin’s book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, examines our present predicament. Democracy, he writes, “is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs.”

Wolin claims that the closest America came to achieving this state of affairs was during the New Deal, under FDR. Since then wealthy elite and the corporations they control have waged a vicious counterattack. Using public relations, advertising, and the dire threat of a foreign enemy under the construct of the cold war and now a war on terror, they have created an “inverted totalitarianism,” based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying on corporate media rather than on government to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

Wolin describes this as a form of “managed democracy” that provides a veneer of participation with a series of never ending campaigns, where American’s get to vote for different personalities rather than real changes in policies.

Ask yourself, why do Obama’s economic and foreign policies feel largely the same as W’s? (The President’s recent speech where he compared NSA spying with Paul Revere was a new low.)

The genius of our All-American inverted totalitarian system, according to Dr. Wolin, “lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual… The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.”

I’ve been writing about economic doctrines and actors that have led to our neoliberal world order. But government collaboration has been essential for the advancement of the neoliberal project. Contra to the idea that neoliberalism thrives in an environment of laissez faire, neoliberalism actually requires a strong government to enforce their version of market fundamentalism.

This is where Professor Wolin’s analysis is so relevant. Our very own red, white and blue managed democracy is the perfect cover for an activist state that represents corporate interests. TPP anyone?

“The main objectives of managed democracy,” writes Dr.Wolin, “are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal.”

Mission accomplished.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Mind Fog

Posted on January 14, 2014 by camelotkidd

When Mark Twain commented that, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is getting its shoes on,” he was talking about America. It’s only gotten worse. We live in a world of bullshit, where reality is manufactured or denied, depending on the circumstances.

How did this come to happen?

US policy makers and corporations have consciously used new methods of propaganda, public relations and advertising to sell products and manipulate public opinion. Products and public opinion were often merged together. After all, ideas and opinions are also products to be sold in America.

There’s another American contribution that is salient for our discussion. “Agnotology is the intentional manufacture of doubt and uncertainty in the general populace for specific political motives,” writes Notre Dame Economics Professor Philip Mirowski, in his indispensable study of neoliberalism—Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste.

According to Professor Mirowski, “Unlike propaganda, agnotology is rooted in the profession of advertising and public relations with close connections to the organization of think tanks and lobbying firms.” Agnotology creates impressions of controversy where actual disputes are marginal. The ultimate purpose is to stymie political action and maintain the present unequal status quo.

One quibble with this otherwise excellent book. Mirowski claims that the earliest instances of agnotology were “deployed in the natural sciences, most specifically, on the political controversies over the cancer consequences of tobacco smoke, Star Wars antimissile systems, the theory of evolution, the efficacy of pharmaceuticals, and the causes and consequences of global warming.”

However, there was an earlier instance that Professor Mirowski missed. Leaded gasoline was actually the original template for corporate and government obfuscation. In The Secret History of Lead, author Jamie Lincoln Kitman, shows how the makers of leaded gasoline systematically suppressed information about the severe health hazards of their product for decades, even though they knew from the mid-1920s on that leaded gasoline was a public health menace.

According to Kitman, “The leaded gas adventurers have profitably polluted the world on a grand scale and, in the process, have provided a model for the asbestos, tobacco, pesticide and nuclear power industries, and other twentieth-century corporate bad actors, for evading clear evidence that their products are harmful by hiding behind the mantle of scientific uncertainty.”

To reveal the hidden history of lead in gasoline, Kitman uncovered documents in the archives of corporate giants like General Motors, E.I. duPont, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon), examined records of the US Public Health Service, and conducted dozens of interviews. The year-and-a-half long process revealed a shocking venture, with complicity of the US government, of putting corporate profits ahead of public safety. The parallel to the tobacco industry extends into the arena of junk science, with scientists from the lead additive industry denying, even today, that their product is dangerous.

Read the whole article. The way in which corporate actors like GM and duPont cynically profited from criminal actions will sound jarringly familiar. Corporations learned that they  could get away with murder by claiming uncertainty and cynically using ideological experts to preclude doing anything that might cut into profits.

Since then corporations, neoliberals and the series of think tanks and foundations they support  have only refined their efforts. Look to the failure to address global warming as the ultimate example of how even the threat of human extinction is no barrier to business as usual.

Agnotology, the manufacture of doubt and uncertainty, is their new and successful refinement.

As Professor Mirowski demonstrates In Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste, “the aim of agnotology is not so much to convince the undecided, but to fog the minds of anyone lacking the patience to delve into the arguments in detail (which is pretty much everyone).”

Mirowski, explains that neoliberalism survived the Wall Street crash and has avoided any blame by evoking doubt in the minds of Americans as to who was to blame. Was it greedy Wall Street bankers, or was it instead the evil government showering cheap mortgages on losers who should never have gotten a loan?

Like I have argued here before, it sure looks looks like a clean getaway.

Now we know why.

Update: Freedom

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Takers

Posted on December 13, 2013 by camelotkidd

A People’s History of the United States, by historian Howard Zinn enrages conservatives. For good reason, the controversial retelling of American history depicts an early republic founded on genocide.

Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, now President of Purdue University, reflects the sentiment of conservatives. “We must not falsely teach American history in our schools.”

But what is history, and who gets to decide?

George Orwell well described this impulse. “He who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past.”

For all the blather about a liberal media and academia, conservatives ideas have dominated how American history is understood. A People’s History of the United States challenges this narrative by expanding the focus of history. Rather than following the hierarchical, great man theory of US history, Zinn recounts stories told by the participants. What he depicts is revolutionary.

Especially relevant is Zinn’s treatment of the early American economy and how fortunes were created. Wealth in America was acquired much the same way as in England, 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.

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.

As Zinn recounts. “One would look, in examining the Revolution’s effect on class relations, at what happened to land confiscated from fleeing Loyalists. It was distributed in such a way as to give a double opportunity to the Revolutionary leaders: to enrich themselves and their friends, and to parcel out some land to small farmers to create a broad base of support for the new government.”

Then there’s that little matter of genocide. Conservatives want to pretend that God above blessed our noble experiment with freedom and liberty for all, and that early America was a bright shining city on the hill. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was widespread slaughter, ethnic cleansing and genocide. See the Trail of Tears if you have a smidgin of doubt.

Zinn pulls no punches. “Now, with the British out of the way, the Americans could begin the inexorable process of pushing the Indians off their lands, killing them if they resisted…”

This original sin of genocide has always been the ultimate nightmare for US rulers. Luckily, they’ve always had talented fixers.

Future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell wrote the Powell Memo in 1971 advising conservatives how to combat the outbreak of democracy and liberalism of the 1960’s, that was threatening, what Powell described as, free enterprise.“Corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades.”

In addition to controlling how history is depicted, conservatives, since the Powell Memo, have become quite adapt at defining the English language. Patriotism has come to mean endless war. Christianity equals the Moral Majority. Freedom has come to mean surveillance. But their ultimate success has been the depiction of our economy as the “free market.”

Nothing illustrates this capture more than the enduring popularity of Ayn Rand, the author who worshipped serial killers and wrote a book entitled The Virtue of Selfishness. She also wrote the immensely influentially novel Atlas Shrugged, creating a milieu where heroic businessmen provide for parasitic workers. We just endured a Presidential campaign where the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, denigrated the majority of American workers as takers. Not only that, but his Vice Presidential pick Paul Ryan, declares with pride, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.”

But who are the real takers?

We don’t even need to study history to witness how primitive accumulation continues in a modern guise. What do you call the looting of pensions by the private equity firms? What about the privatization of our public schools by hedge funds? And, don’t even get me started on the crippling austerity on government spending and denial of unemployment benefits.

No wonder conservatives loath A People’s History of the United States. Zinn’s history combined with the ongoing predation of American capitalism makes it quite apparent who the real takers are.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Coming Out of the Closet

Posted on December 7, 2013 by camelotkidd

I have decided to come out of the closet and live my life free from shame.

Nope, not gay, if that’s what you were thinking. Not that there’s anything wrong with that sort of thing.

No, my closet consists of hackneyed economic conventional wisdom.

In my last post, critiquing neoliberalism, I avoided using Karl Marx as a reference because Marx and Marxism have been converted into pejoratives. In the process it came to me: I’m a Marxist.

There, I said it. Don’t hate me.

I’m a Marxist in the sense that Marx was, after all, an economist who critiqued capitalism. I’m not an economist but I critique capitalism, frequently.

Our system of propaganda is powerful. Noam Chomsky frequently points out that our propaganda system targets intellectuals with their meta narrative.  This message comes complete with heros and villains and there is no greater villain than Marx. I’m pretty sure I internalized this.

Reading Marx in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash and ongoing economic recession it’s apparent that the dude was on to something. He examined capitalism critically and found that it would ultimately lead to gross inequality. Check. He predicted that over production would cause a fall in demand and lead to an over financialization of the economy. Check and check.

Certainly Marx’s inquiry into the nature of capitalism earned him the hatred of the ownership class. But unfortunately, many intellectuals have been complicit in demonizing Marx by conflating his critique of capitalism with the Marxist movements of the 20th century. The USSR, for example, was depicted as the perfect embodiment of Marxism. Among right-wing intellectuals it was especially fruitful to smear any socialist or nationalist movement as both Marxist and controlled by the Soviet Union. See the ongoing coverage of the death of Nelson Mandela for a manual.

With the demise of the Soviet Union there has been an intellectual triumphalism that has led to a further discrediting of Marx. The end of history theory was treated as sober truth in the early 90’s, now it’s ridiculous. However, capitalist cheerleaders are always useful and I’m pretty sure they will never admit they were wrong. Also too, the (TINA) “Thatcherites” will forever attack Marx to preclude any hope of an alternative to neoliberal capitalism.

For all the intellectual firepower directed at Marx he is more relevant than ever. After all, there is that class thing that Marx emphasized. With record levels of inequality Americans are starting to look around and notice that there is indeed a class-war, the rich have won and they are busy finishing off the survivors.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism gets it exactly right when she notes “…as political science has documented, American politics are driven not by voters but by powerful monied interests. And perversely, those groups on the whole seem to believe that bleeding ordinary Americans dry is a winning strategy for them. Short term, of course, it sure looks that way, but we look to be at the end of an economic paradigm, so how long they can keep that sort of thing up remains to be seen.”

I believe the demonization of Marx and subsequent lionization of capitalism comes down to control over the levers of power.

Under our American system of neoliberal capitalism, we have a rich, powerful elite who rule unobtrusively, without the sullen acquiescence under a dictatorship. As anthropologist Peter Rigby says, “Capitalism is the most opaque form of oppression known to mankind, because in capitalism, people are convinced they are free, when, in fact, they are in chains.”

John Lennon was another guy who understood a thing or too about class warfare.

“Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be.”

Amen.

Update: I found this interview with Chris Hedges that dovetails nicely.

“JAY: You quote in your article Karl Marx writing, “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” Why did that hit you?

HEDGES: Well, because the whole notion of the free market–laissez-faire capitalism, globalization–is a very thin rationale for unmitigated greed by a tiny oligarchic elite. And they have made sure that that ideology is taught in universities across the country. And people, especially economists, who deviate from that ideology have been pushed aside, have become pariahs. And yet the driving ethos of that ideology is really to justify the hoarding of immense amounts of wealth by a very tiny percentage of, you know, the upper ruling class. That’s what it is.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Primitive Accumulation

Posted on November 28, 2013 by camelotkidd

I’m fascinated by neoliberalism and the worship of the market. I’m especially interested in the intellectual underpinnings of this ideology and how it became our de facto religion.

In his new book: Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Meltdown, Philip Mirowski finds an apt comparison to this situation in classic studies of cognitive dissonance. He concludes that “neoliberal thought has become so pervasive that any countervailing evidence serves only to further convince disciples of its ultimate truth. Once neoliberalism became a Theory of Everything, providing a revolutionary account of self, knowledge, information, markets, and government, it could no longer be falsified by anything as trifling as data from the “real” economy.”

Imagine that.

Mirowski says that neoliberalism differs from classical economics in that its insistence on the use of markets for everything actually requires “strong uses of state intervention.”

Gee, where have I seen the government setting up markets and forcing citizens to purchase from said markets under penalty?

Give yourself a cookie if you answered the Affordable Care Act.

In attempting to understand neo-liberalism, it’s useful to go back to the beginning and make some inquiries about the foundation of this ideology. Is neoliberalism, where private enterprise requires vigorous state intervention, a modern phenomenon, or is this just a feature of capitalism?

That’s a question Michael Perelman attempts to answer in, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. 

Perelman shows how economic writers such as Adam Smith attempted to portray early capitalism  as “a natural system of voluntary market relations, which are devoid of conflict, and benefitted all of mankind.”

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

Early capitalists needed desperate people willing to work as wage slaves in the horribly dangerous factories.

But why should peasants leave the farm and their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory?

As Perelman makes clear, the peasants did not go willingly. They 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.”

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.”

I think I’m starting to get the hang of this neoliberalism thing: Government intervention on behest of wealthy business owners is the magic of the free market. Government intervention on behalf of the poor and middle class is the worst kind of tyranny.

Update: I’m not the only one taking neoliberalism to task. This guy is way above my pay grade.

Update Part 2: Of course you just knew that any criticism of the sacred would make their heads explode.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Ratfuck That Keeps on Giving

Posted on November 22, 2013 by camelotkidd

I read compulsively, mostly non-fiction with a focus on world affairs. I’m always looking for the missing piece of a puzzle. What caused historical actors to do what they did? Why this particular policy and not that one? That sort of thing.

I’m weird, I know.

Anyway, the other day I found one of those missing pieces.

Some background. John Ehrlichman was the chief assistant for domestic affairs under President Nixon, where “he became a member of the inner circle of Nixon’s closest advisors.” Ehrlichman created the “Plumbers,” a group of burglars who broke into Watergate, and he sought to destroy Nixon’s enemies at “virtually any cost.” Ehrlichman was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. He served 18 months in prison.

After prison, Ehrlichman granted an interview to author Dan Baum, and explained why Nixon inaugurated the War on Drugs:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Wow! The first thing I thought of is that this may be the best ratfuck ever.

The term ratfuck refers to dirty political tricks or sabotage and was a widely used tactic during the Nixon administration by staffers such as Donald Segretti and H.R. Halderman. And, of course, John Ehrlichman.

The War on Drugs has been used and is still being used by our sociopathic elite as a means to divide and rule. Here at home it’s employed to control and incarcerate people of color in the inner city and to bash hippies. Abroad it’s used to as a proxy to wage counterinsurgency against any group or nation that challenges US hegemony.

War on Drugs. The ratfuck that keeps on giving.

Update: “The coordinated raids of at least a dozen Denver dispensaries on Thursday are the latest federal law enforcement actions to occur in the wake of legalization votes last November in Colorado and Washington states.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Little Timmy’s Big Payday

Posted on November 19, 2013 by camelotkidd

Last week the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell of an Opinion article by former Federal Reserve official, Andrew Huszar. You may not have heard of it.

“I can only say: I’m sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.”

And what has been the result of this policy to aid Wall Street at the expense of Main Street? Glad you asked.

The New York Times has a heart breaking story detailing the effects of the economic downturn caused by the Wall Street crash, “It has been a painful slide. A five-year spell of unemployment has slowly scrubbed away nearly every vestige of Ms. Barrington-Ward’s middle-class life. She is a 53-year-old college graduate who worked steadily for three decades. She is now broke and homeless.”

However, the architects of the Wall Street bailout are doing just fine. For example, former Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, has joined Warburg Pincus, a 47-year-old private equity firm that oversees $35 billion in assets.

As William K. Black, professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, reminds us, “Mr. Geithner follows in the path of past Treasury secretaries who, after leaving government, have accepted lucrative Wall Street posts. After leaving the Clinton administration, Robert E. Rubin joined Citigroup.  And John W. Snow, a Treasury secretary in the George W. Bush administration, joined the private equity firm Cerberus.”

But, he earned this high paying job, for a lifetime of public service. Hah, hah, hah.

In the same article, Professor Black explains why Little Timmy is so valuable to the owners. “Geithner is not a financial expert, but that was no bar to making him the head of the NY Fed or Treasury.  The bankers and their political allies put the Geithners of the world in positions of increasing power not despite their weaknesses and failures but because of their willingness to aid the bankers even when doing so will betray their office.”  

In an unguarded aside, a banker confided how he really felt about Little Timmy.

“For Washington to not demand anything when it saved us, even stuff we know is good for our long term good was one of the stupidest moves in modern times. I figured Obama understood that – it wasn’t a nuanced point – and that he didn’t act as we started to pull out of the abyss six months ago. But he didn’t, and I don’t know who to thank. I feel like I should go over and hug Tim. It’s a shame we can’t pay him, ‘cause that’s a guy who really earned a big time bonus.”

If you want to understand why we have the policies we do, this revolving door between finance and government is a good place to start. We aren’t a fully corrupt Third World country where bribes and payoff are openly tolerated. No, we do it differently in the USA. Here, if you’re a good little boy or girl and go along with the plan, when your tour of duty in government is through, you’ll be taken care of.

I had serious doubts about Obama before the election but once he named Little Timmy as his Treasury Secretary, I knew the fix was in. There might be hope but there damn sure wouldn’t be any change.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Monsters Among Us

Posted on November 3, 2013 by camelotkidd

We were privileged to have a real live monster visit Salt Lake City days after Halloween.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke on independent journalism and its role in diplomacy at Rowland Hall as part of the McCarthey family lecture series.

Albright said that independent journalism is a vital weapon against totalitarianism, and is “part of the foundation of any democracy.”

Albright continued with the jaw dropping hypocrisy, describing how autocratic governments want to “control the information to have the power,” while  in the next breath, criticizing Wilileaks and Edward Snowden as having “done more damage to this country and our diplomacy than anything I have seen in a long time.”

Ha, ha, ha.

Albright also confessed her biggest regret. And, no it wasn’t allowing a half a million Iraqi children to die due to US sanctions, for those of you who are keeping score at home.

No, Albright said her biggest regret in public service was the “inaction of the United States to stop the genocide in Rwanda.”

I don’t know what it is about Utah, but monsters feel very comfortable coming here to speak. Maybe it’s the Mormon culture that is respectful and obedient towards authority, but it could be the breathtaking scenery.

Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and now Madeleine Albright. Monsters, every one of them. But it’s America right? So they’re not in prison, but on the lecture circuit, or ensconced at elite universities. The Nuremberg principles don’t apply to our monsters, only small time monsters, like Milosevic.

Why is it that we castigate foreign tyrants for carrying out genocidal actions and suppression of the media while at the same time, venerating American leaders who engage in the same if not worse behavior?

In a word, empire. American elite and the media allow such a double standard becuase otherwise this true state of affairs would stand fully exposed. The fury directed at whistleblowers, comes from the fear that these exposures allow the American people to begin to discern the economic and military policies that benefit only the wealthy, the corporations they control, and their political retainers such as Senator Dianne Finestein,

Marcey Wheeler at Emptywheel helps unpack the double standard and explains the rational behind the NSA’s actions in support of empire.

“Meanwhile, I think we grab everything we can overseas out of hubris we got while we were the uncontested world power, and only accelerated now that we’re losing that uncontested position. If we’re going to sustain power through coercion — and we developed a nasty habit of doing so, especially under Bush — then we need to know enough to coerce successfully. So we collect. Everything. Even if doing so makes us stupider and more reliant on coercion.”

Asked why Americans shouldn’t know about our governments actions through whistleblowers, Albright claimed that we need to have a “huge discussion about what is appropriate or not…without all the damage that has been done.”

I won’t be holding my breath, monster.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment