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).”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

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.”

 

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

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?

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

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

 

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

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