https://srsroccoreport.com/u-s-second-largest-oil-field-production-falls-as-decline-rates-rise/
U.S. Second Largest Oil Field Production Falls As Decline Rates Rise
While Americans continue to believe that the U.S. will become energy independent, the county’s second largest shale oil field is seeing a drop in production due to a rising decline rate. The Eagle Ford Region in Texas experienced an increase in production as the oil price, and drilling activity increased since the beginning of 2016.
At its peak in March of 2015, the Eagle Ford was producing more than 1.7 million barrels of oil per day (mbd) but fell 30% to 1.2 mbd in November 2016 as the oil price declined. However, as the oil price recovered and drilling rig activity increased, oil production at the Eagle Ford rose to 1.4 mbd currently.
Unfortunately, oil production at the Eagle Ford is forecasted to decline in October. According to the EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report, the Eagle Ford will add 89,000 new barrels of oil per day (bd) in October but will lose 98,000 bd due to legacy declines:
The top graph in the chart above shows the monthly decline rate in the Eagle Ford Region. As oil production increased in the field, so did the decline rate. When the Eagle Ford peaked in oil production at the beginning of 2015, so did its legacy decline… a whopping 140,000 bd. Furthermore, as drilling rig activity decreased, the decline rate started to fall, shown as the line moving higher. Eagle Ford’s monthly decline dropped to 80,000 bd at the beginning of 2017. However, as drilling rig activity increased once again, from 36 at the end of 2016 to 91 in July, the decline rate started to increase as well.
Even though the Eagle Ford will add 89,000 bd of new production in October, it will lose 98,000 bd, for a net loss of 9,000 bd:
Now think about this for a minute. The drilling rig activity in the Eagle Ford surged from 36 at the end of 2016 to 91 by June, but production only increased 200,000 bd. Now, production is already falling as drilling rig activity moderately declines. Also, most of the companies producing shale oil in the Eagle Ford didn’t make any money as production increased 200,000 bd.
While the Eagle Ford is suffering a significant monthly decline rate, it pales in comparison to what is taking place in the Permian Region. The EIA forecasts that the Permian Region will experience a stunning 160,000 bd decline in October:
As we can see, the Permian Region will add 215,000 bd of new production in October, while its decline of 160,000 will add a net of 55,000 bd for the month. To increase oil production in the Permian, from 2.0 mbd in June 2016 to 2.6 mbd currently, the drilling rig count jumped from 145 to 373. Thus, the drilling rig count increased by a staggering 228 to add that 600,000 bd of production.
Unfortunately, the Permian will suffer the same peak and decline as did the Eagle Ford. While many energy analysts believe oil production will continue to increase in the Permian until 2022, I don’t belong to that mindset. Rather, I think oil production at the Permian may peak and decline a lot sooner, especially if the oil price head back into the $40 range.
The U.S. Shale Oil Industry is in serious trouble as the majority of companies have used a lot of debt to finance continued drilling. The massive $250+ billion in debt will never be repaid. When investors finally realize they are the SHALE OIL BAG HOLDERS, funds for future drilling will dry up and blow away. As funds dry up, so will production… like a rock.
The collapse of the U.S. Shale Energy Ponzi Scheme will destroy the myth of America’s energy independence and for all.
Saturday, September 30, 2017
SC150-7
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47916.htm
The US Economy Is Failing
Do the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editors read their own newspaper?
The frontpage headline story for the Labor Day weekend was “Low Wage Growth Challenges Fed.” Despite an alleged 4.4% unemployment rate, which is full employment, there is no real growth in wages. The front page story pointed out correctly that an economy alleged to be expanding at full employment, but absent any wage growth or inflation, is “a puzzle that complicates Federal Reserve policy decisions.”
On the editorial page itself, under “letters to the editor,” Professor Tony Lima of California State University points out what I have stressed for years: “The labor-force participation rate remains at historic lows. Much of the decrease is in the 18-34 age group, while participation rates have increased for those 55 and older.” Professor Lima points out that more evidence that the American worker is not in good shape comes from the rising number of Americans who can only find part-time work, which leaves them with truncated incomes and no fringe benefits, such as healh care.
Positioned right next to this factual letter is the lead editorial written by someone who read neither the front page story or the professor’s letter. The lead editorial declares: “The biggest labor story this Labor Day is the trouble that employers are having finding workers across the country.” The Journal’s editorial page editors believe the solution to the alleged labor shortage is Senator Ron Johnson’s (R.Wis.) bill to permit the states to give 500,000 work visas to foreigners.
In my day as a Wall Street Journal editor and columnist, questions would have been asked that would have nixed the editorial. For example, how is there a labor shortage when there is no upward pressure on wages? In tight labor markets wages are bid up as employers compete for workers. For example, how is the labor market tight when the labor force participation rate is at historical lows. When jobs are available, the participation rate rises as people enter the work force to take the jobs.
I have reported on a number of occasions that according to Federal Reserve studies, more Americans in the 24-34 age group live at home with parents than independently, and that it is those 55 and older who are taking the part time jobs. Why is this? The answer is that part time jobs do not pay enough to support an independent existence, and the Federal Reserve’s decade long zero interest rate policy forces retirees to enter the work force as their retirement savings produce no income. It is not only the manufacturing jobs of the middle class blue collar workers that have been given to foreigners in order to cut labor costs and thus maximize payouts to executives and shareholders, but also tradable professional skill jobs such as software engineering, design, accounting, and IT—jobs that Americans expected to get in order to pay off their student loans.
The Wall Street Journal editorial asserts that the young are not in the work force because they are on drugs, or on disability, or because of their poor education. However, all over the country there are college graduates with good educations who cannot find jobs because the jobs have been offshored. To worsen the crisis, a Republican Senator from Wisconsin wants to bring in more foreigners on work permits to drive US wages down lower so that no American can survive on the wage, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page editors endorse this travesty!
The foreigners on work visas are paid one-third less than the going US wage. They live together in groups in cramped quarters. They have no employee rights. They are exploited in order to raise executive bonuses and shareholder capital gains. I have exposed this scheme at length in my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism (Clarity Press, 2013).
When Trump said he was going to bring the jobs home, he resonated, but, of course, he will not be permitted to bring them home, any more than he has been permitted to normalize relations with Russia.
In America Government is not in the hands of its people. Government is in the hands of a ruling oligarchy. Oligarchic rule prevails regardless of electoral outcomes. The American people are entering a world of slavery more severe than anything that previously existed. Without jobs, dependent on their masters for trickle-down benefits that are always subject to being cut, and without voice or representation, Americans, except for the One Percent, are becoming the most enslaved people in history.
Americans carry on by accumulating debt and becoming debt slaves. Many can only make the minimum payment on their credit card and thus accumulate debt. The Federal Reserve’s policy has exploded the prices of financial assets. The result is that the bulk of the population lacks discretionary income, and those with financial assets are wealthy until values adjust to reality.
As an economist I cannot identify in history any economy whose affairs have been so badly managed and prospects so severely damaged as the economy of the United States of America. In the short/intermediate run policies that damage the prospects for the American work force benefit what is called the One Percent as jobs offshoring reduces corporate costs and financialization transfers remaining discretionary income in interest and fees to the financial sector. But as consumer discretionary incomes disappear and debt burdens rise, aggregate demand falters, and there is nothing left to drive the economy.
What we are witnessing in the United States is the first country to reverse the development process and to go backward by giving up industry, manufacturing, and tradable professional skill jobs. The labor force is becoming Third World with lowly paid domestic service jobs taking the place of high-productivity, high-value added jobs.
The initial response was to put wives and mothers into the work force, but now even many two-earner families experience stagnant or falling material living standards. New university graduates are faced with substantial debts without jobs capable of producing sufficient income to pay off the debts.
Now the US is on a course of travelling backward at a faster rate. Robots are to take over more and more jobs, displacing more people. Robots don’t buy houses, furniture, appliances, cars, clothes, food, entertainment, medical services, etc. Unless Robots pay payroll taxes, the financing for Social Security and Medicare will collapse. And it goes on down from there. Consumer spending simply dries up, so who purcheses the goods and services supplied by robots?
To find such important considerations absent in public debate suggests that the United States will continue on the country’s de-industrialization, de-manufacturing trajectory.
The US Economy Is Failing
Do the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editors read their own newspaper?
The frontpage headline story for the Labor Day weekend was “Low Wage Growth Challenges Fed.” Despite an alleged 4.4% unemployment rate, which is full employment, there is no real growth in wages. The front page story pointed out correctly that an economy alleged to be expanding at full employment, but absent any wage growth or inflation, is “a puzzle that complicates Federal Reserve policy decisions.”
On the editorial page itself, under “letters to the editor,” Professor Tony Lima of California State University points out what I have stressed for years: “The labor-force participation rate remains at historic lows. Much of the decrease is in the 18-34 age group, while participation rates have increased for those 55 and older.” Professor Lima points out that more evidence that the American worker is not in good shape comes from the rising number of Americans who can only find part-time work, which leaves them with truncated incomes and no fringe benefits, such as healh care.
Positioned right next to this factual letter is the lead editorial written by someone who read neither the front page story or the professor’s letter. The lead editorial declares: “The biggest labor story this Labor Day is the trouble that employers are having finding workers across the country.” The Journal’s editorial page editors believe the solution to the alleged labor shortage is Senator Ron Johnson’s (R.Wis.) bill to permit the states to give 500,000 work visas to foreigners.
In my day as a Wall Street Journal editor and columnist, questions would have been asked that would have nixed the editorial. For example, how is there a labor shortage when there is no upward pressure on wages? In tight labor markets wages are bid up as employers compete for workers. For example, how is the labor market tight when the labor force participation rate is at historical lows. When jobs are available, the participation rate rises as people enter the work force to take the jobs.
I have reported on a number of occasions that according to Federal Reserve studies, more Americans in the 24-34 age group live at home with parents than independently, and that it is those 55 and older who are taking the part time jobs. Why is this? The answer is that part time jobs do not pay enough to support an independent existence, and the Federal Reserve’s decade long zero interest rate policy forces retirees to enter the work force as their retirement savings produce no income. It is not only the manufacturing jobs of the middle class blue collar workers that have been given to foreigners in order to cut labor costs and thus maximize payouts to executives and shareholders, but also tradable professional skill jobs such as software engineering, design, accounting, and IT—jobs that Americans expected to get in order to pay off their student loans.
The Wall Street Journal editorial asserts that the young are not in the work force because they are on drugs, or on disability, or because of their poor education. However, all over the country there are college graduates with good educations who cannot find jobs because the jobs have been offshored. To worsen the crisis, a Republican Senator from Wisconsin wants to bring in more foreigners on work permits to drive US wages down lower so that no American can survive on the wage, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page editors endorse this travesty!
The foreigners on work visas are paid one-third less than the going US wage. They live together in groups in cramped quarters. They have no employee rights. They are exploited in order to raise executive bonuses and shareholder capital gains. I have exposed this scheme at length in my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism (Clarity Press, 2013).
When Trump said he was going to bring the jobs home, he resonated, but, of course, he will not be permitted to bring them home, any more than he has been permitted to normalize relations with Russia.
In America Government is not in the hands of its people. Government is in the hands of a ruling oligarchy. Oligarchic rule prevails regardless of electoral outcomes. The American people are entering a world of slavery more severe than anything that previously existed. Without jobs, dependent on their masters for trickle-down benefits that are always subject to being cut, and without voice or representation, Americans, except for the One Percent, are becoming the most enslaved people in history.
Americans carry on by accumulating debt and becoming debt slaves. Many can only make the minimum payment on their credit card and thus accumulate debt. The Federal Reserve’s policy has exploded the prices of financial assets. The result is that the bulk of the population lacks discretionary income, and those with financial assets are wealthy until values adjust to reality.
As an economist I cannot identify in history any economy whose affairs have been so badly managed and prospects so severely damaged as the economy of the United States of America. In the short/intermediate run policies that damage the prospects for the American work force benefit what is called the One Percent as jobs offshoring reduces corporate costs and financialization transfers remaining discretionary income in interest and fees to the financial sector. But as consumer discretionary incomes disappear and debt burdens rise, aggregate demand falters, and there is nothing left to drive the economy.
What we are witnessing in the United States is the first country to reverse the development process and to go backward by giving up industry, manufacturing, and tradable professional skill jobs. The labor force is becoming Third World with lowly paid domestic service jobs taking the place of high-productivity, high-value added jobs.
The initial response was to put wives and mothers into the work force, but now even many two-earner families experience stagnant or falling material living standards. New university graduates are faced with substantial debts without jobs capable of producing sufficient income to pay off the debts.
Now the US is on a course of travelling backward at a faster rate. Robots are to take over more and more jobs, displacing more people. Robots don’t buy houses, furniture, appliances, cars, clothes, food, entertainment, medical services, etc. Unless Robots pay payroll taxes, the financing for Social Security and Medicare will collapse. And it goes on down from there. Consumer spending simply dries up, so who purcheses the goods and services supplied by robots?
To find such important considerations absent in public debate suggests that the United States will continue on the country’s de-industrialization, de-manufacturing trajectory.
SC150-6
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47918.htm
Germany and Russia's Bond of War & Peace
No other countries on the Eurasian continent suffered so much from war than Germany and Russia. But perhaps out of this mutually painful experience of horror and loss, the two powerhouses can in partnership forge a new geopolitical direction.
A new direction that would turn simmering conflict and saber-rattling into plowshares in order to cultivate international peace and prosperity.
Nazi Germany's aggression towards the Soviet Union inflicted at least 27 million deaths during the 1941-45 war; Germany was likewise laid to ruins, with up to six million of its military personnel — some 90 percent of its total war losses — killed by the resurgent Soviet forces.
Death, disease, destitution and mass starvation scarred both nations. More than any other country, Russia and Germany know the full horror and suffering of war. Therefore, it is incumbent on both to do everything to ensure that such violence should never be repeated.
This week, Germany's ambassador to Russia, Rudiger von Fritsch renewed the bond of friendship between the two nations. In a meeting with Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Russian Upper Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, the German envoy said: "There is no alternative to good relations between Russia and Germany."
He added that Germany and Russia "share responsibility for the destiny of the Eurasian continent".
A truer word could not be spoken.
However, there is a special onus on Germany to find its independence in foreign policy and to build a strategic partnership with Russia. Not only for the sake of Germany, but for the European Union and the wider Eurasian continent.
To be blunt, Germany has for too long allowed its natural relations with Russia to become warped under the sway of an overbearing transatlantic dominance by Washington.
Recall that when the US-led NATO alliance was formed in 1949, its first general secretary, Britain's Lord Ismay, candidly described the purpose of the organization thus: "To keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."
This mentality of divide-and-rule has served well an Anglo-American agenda of giving Washington an overweening presence and role in determining European affairs, in particular in the latter's relations with Moscow.
But Europe has paid a heavy price for its transatlantic thrall to Washington.
As Germany's recent elections have shown, the country has become bitterly divided over the issue of massive influx of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats were re-elected, but only after incurring big electoral losses to the anti-immigrant newcomer party, Alternative for Germany. Merkel is now tasked with cobbling together a coalition government in the aftermath.
Widespread popular rancor over large-scale immigration has also strained the cohesiveness of the European Union. The backlash against the EU from populist parties is felt in Britain, France, Holland to Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
The political stresses being felt both inside Germany and across Europe are arguably the direct result of the EU being a bystander to decades of American-led illegal wars in the Middle East. European powers stand accused of being complicit in these US wars which have destabilized whole nations and set off the phenomenal mass migration towards Europe.
If European powers had shown more independence and acted to avert US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere, it seems reasonable to posit that the anti-immigrant politics which are tearing at the social fabric within Germany and Europe would not have arisen. In other words, it was precisely Europe being in thrall to Washington's policies that have created so much of the bloc's current turmoil.
The same can be said about American agitation for NATO's expansion and force buildup around Russia. The ensuing tensions between Russia and Europe have grown out of all proportion to the objective circumstances. Russia has repeatedly said that it has no intention to threaten the borders of any European state, yet this specter has been continually whipped up by the US-led transatlantic axis.
The most recent example of this was the Western media hysteria surrounding Russia's Zapad 2017 military defense exercises in Belarus at the end of last month. NATO officials and pro-transatlantic politicians like Britain's Michael Fallon were warning of an imminent Russian invasion of the Baltics. As it turned out, the Zapad exercises passed without any such incident, and were seen to be a defensive drill, exactly just as Russia had been consistently maintaining. But you see how the American-dominated Russophobia was irresponsibly stoking European alarm and tensions with Moscow.
If only German leaders could make the full transition to independence in foreign policy. And abandon the futile, unnecessary antagonism with Russia.
Former German defense minister Willy Wimmer can see through the nonsense. Why can't others? In a media interview from three years ago, Wimmer rejected the Washington-led narrative that Russia instigated the Ukraine crisis. He has the balanced insight to see that it was the US and European allies who destabilized the country with an illegal coup against an elected government in Kiev in February 2014.
The American and European economic sanctions that have been imposed on Russia during the past three years over alleged Russian interference in Ukraine are baseless, as Wimmer points out. These sanctions have rebounded to damage Europe's economy to a much greater extent than America's because of the extensive bilateral links between Europe and Russia.
Now the Trump administration is moving to impose more sanctions that would be detrimental to Europe's vast energy supplies from Russia. The obvious ulterior motive here is for the Americans to replace Russia as the energy exporter to Europe — at much higher financial costs to the European governments and citizens.
Germany has reacted angrily to those latest US sanctions, saying they constitute undue interference by Washington in European affairs. It's about time that Berlin woke up to reality. The issue epitomizes the bigger geopolitical picture of how Washington meddles in European-Russian relations for its selfish interests.
American unilateralism is pushing the world towards more conflict. Whether it is to do with North Korea, Iran, China, or between Europe and Russia.
As the strongest power in the European Union, Germany has a special responsibility to promote diplomacy and peaceful resolutions. Berlin must forge the greater partnership with Moscow to create a vital counterbalance to reckless American unilateralism.
Germany and Russia's shared experience of war and suffering is a powerful incentive for the two nations to lead the way forward for Europe and the world in the pursuit of peace. America's relatively unscathed experience in suffering war is perhaps why its leaders are often gung-ho about starting wars.
For this to happen, Germany must find the political courage and independence to reject Washington's inordinate influence. Chancellor Merkel is known to have little regard for Trump and his loose-cannon policies. Her fourth term in office is an auspicious time for Berlin to radically rethink the transatlantic dependence on Washington.
As the German envoy said earlier: "There is no alternative to good relations between Russia and Germany."
Indeed, the future of peaceful relations in Eurasia and the world may depend on it.
Germany and Russia's Bond of War & Peace
No other countries on the Eurasian continent suffered so much from war than Germany and Russia. But perhaps out of this mutually painful experience of horror and loss, the two powerhouses can in partnership forge a new geopolitical direction.
A new direction that would turn simmering conflict and saber-rattling into plowshares in order to cultivate international peace and prosperity.
Nazi Germany's aggression towards the Soviet Union inflicted at least 27 million deaths during the 1941-45 war; Germany was likewise laid to ruins, with up to six million of its military personnel — some 90 percent of its total war losses — killed by the resurgent Soviet forces.
Death, disease, destitution and mass starvation scarred both nations. More than any other country, Russia and Germany know the full horror and suffering of war. Therefore, it is incumbent on both to do everything to ensure that such violence should never be repeated.
This week, Germany's ambassador to Russia, Rudiger von Fritsch renewed the bond of friendship between the two nations. In a meeting with Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Russian Upper Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, the German envoy said: "There is no alternative to good relations between Russia and Germany."
He added that Germany and Russia "share responsibility for the destiny of the Eurasian continent".
A truer word could not be spoken.
However, there is a special onus on Germany to find its independence in foreign policy and to build a strategic partnership with Russia. Not only for the sake of Germany, but for the European Union and the wider Eurasian continent.
To be blunt, Germany has for too long allowed its natural relations with Russia to become warped under the sway of an overbearing transatlantic dominance by Washington.
Recall that when the US-led NATO alliance was formed in 1949, its first general secretary, Britain's Lord Ismay, candidly described the purpose of the organization thus: "To keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."
This mentality of divide-and-rule has served well an Anglo-American agenda of giving Washington an overweening presence and role in determining European affairs, in particular in the latter's relations with Moscow.
But Europe has paid a heavy price for its transatlantic thrall to Washington.
As Germany's recent elections have shown, the country has become bitterly divided over the issue of massive influx of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats were re-elected, but only after incurring big electoral losses to the anti-immigrant newcomer party, Alternative for Germany. Merkel is now tasked with cobbling together a coalition government in the aftermath.
Widespread popular rancor over large-scale immigration has also strained the cohesiveness of the European Union. The backlash against the EU from populist parties is felt in Britain, France, Holland to Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
The political stresses being felt both inside Germany and across Europe are arguably the direct result of the EU being a bystander to decades of American-led illegal wars in the Middle East. European powers stand accused of being complicit in these US wars which have destabilized whole nations and set off the phenomenal mass migration towards Europe.
If European powers had shown more independence and acted to avert US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere, it seems reasonable to posit that the anti-immigrant politics which are tearing at the social fabric within Germany and Europe would not have arisen. In other words, it was precisely Europe being in thrall to Washington's policies that have created so much of the bloc's current turmoil.
The same can be said about American agitation for NATO's expansion and force buildup around Russia. The ensuing tensions between Russia and Europe have grown out of all proportion to the objective circumstances. Russia has repeatedly said that it has no intention to threaten the borders of any European state, yet this specter has been continually whipped up by the US-led transatlantic axis.
The most recent example of this was the Western media hysteria surrounding Russia's Zapad 2017 military defense exercises in Belarus at the end of last month. NATO officials and pro-transatlantic politicians like Britain's Michael Fallon were warning of an imminent Russian invasion of the Baltics. As it turned out, the Zapad exercises passed without any such incident, and were seen to be a defensive drill, exactly just as Russia had been consistently maintaining. But you see how the American-dominated Russophobia was irresponsibly stoking European alarm and tensions with Moscow.
If only German leaders could make the full transition to independence in foreign policy. And abandon the futile, unnecessary antagonism with Russia.
Former German defense minister Willy Wimmer can see through the nonsense. Why can't others? In a media interview from three years ago, Wimmer rejected the Washington-led narrative that Russia instigated the Ukraine crisis. He has the balanced insight to see that it was the US and European allies who destabilized the country with an illegal coup against an elected government in Kiev in February 2014.
The American and European economic sanctions that have been imposed on Russia during the past three years over alleged Russian interference in Ukraine are baseless, as Wimmer points out. These sanctions have rebounded to damage Europe's economy to a much greater extent than America's because of the extensive bilateral links between Europe and Russia.
Now the Trump administration is moving to impose more sanctions that would be detrimental to Europe's vast energy supplies from Russia. The obvious ulterior motive here is for the Americans to replace Russia as the energy exporter to Europe — at much higher financial costs to the European governments and citizens.
Germany has reacted angrily to those latest US sanctions, saying they constitute undue interference by Washington in European affairs. It's about time that Berlin woke up to reality. The issue epitomizes the bigger geopolitical picture of how Washington meddles in European-Russian relations for its selfish interests.
American unilateralism is pushing the world towards more conflict. Whether it is to do with North Korea, Iran, China, or between Europe and Russia.
As the strongest power in the European Union, Germany has a special responsibility to promote diplomacy and peaceful resolutions. Berlin must forge the greater partnership with Moscow to create a vital counterbalance to reckless American unilateralism.
Germany and Russia's shared experience of war and suffering is a powerful incentive for the two nations to lead the way forward for Europe and the world in the pursuit of peace. America's relatively unscathed experience in suffering war is perhaps why its leaders are often gung-ho about starting wars.
For this to happen, Germany must find the political courage and independence to reject Washington's inordinate influence. Chancellor Merkel is known to have little regard for Trump and his loose-cannon policies. Her fourth term in office is an auspicious time for Berlin to radically rethink the transatlantic dependence on Washington.
As the German envoy said earlier: "There is no alternative to good relations between Russia and Germany."
Indeed, the future of peaceful relations in Eurasia and the world may depend on it.
Friday, September 29, 2017
SC150-5
https://realinvestmentadvice.com/the-illusion-of-prosperity/
The Illusion of Prosperity
For the last 50 years, the consumer, that means you and me, have been the most powerful force driving the U.S. economy. Household spending now accounts for almost 70% of economic growth, about 10% more than it did in 1971. Household spending in the U.S. is also approximately 10-15% higher than most other developed nations.
Currently, U.S. economic growth is anemic and still suffering from the after-shocks of the financial crisis. Importantly, much of that weakness is the result of growing stress on consumers. Using the compelling graph below and the data behind it, we can illustrate why the U.S. economy and consumers are struggling.
The blue line on the graph above marks the difference between median disposable income (income less taxes) and the median cost of living. A positive number indicates people at the median made more than their costs of living. In other words, their income exceeds the costs of things like food, housing, and insurance and they have money left over to spend or save. This is often referred to as “having disposable income.” If the number in the above calculation is negative, income is not enough to cover essential expenses.
From at least 1959 to 1971, the blue line above was positive and trending higher. The consumer was in great shape. In 1971 the trend reversed in part due to President Nixon’s actions to remove the U.S. dollar from the gold standard. Unbeknownst to many at the time, that decision allowed the U.S. government to run consistent trade and fiscal deficits while its citizens were able to take on more debt. Other than rampant inflation, there were no immediate consequences. In 1971, following this historic action, the blue line began to trend lower.
By 1990, the median U.S. citizen had less disposable income than the median cost of living; i.e., the blue line turned negative. This trend lower has continued ever since. The 2008 financial crisis proved to be a tipping point where the burden of debt was too much for many consumers to handle. Since 2008 the negative trend in the blue line has further steepened.
You might be thinking, if incomes were less than our standard of living, why did it feel like our standard of living remained stable?
One Word – DEBT.
To help answer that question, we added the green line to the chart. This line adds consumer credit and transfer payments to the blue line. Consumer credit encompasses credit cards, lines of credit, auto loans, student loans, and other non-mortgage forms of consumer debt. Transfer payments are benefits the government bestows upon its citizens in which no goods or services are received in return. Examples include: welfare, food stamps, insurance, and medical benefits. It is important to note that, given the continual deficits run by the U.S. government, these benefits are predominately paid for with borrowed funds.
Note that the green line, unlike the blue line, remains positive and relatively stable from 1959 to 2008, 20 years longer than the blue line. The take away is that consumer and government debt filled the diverging gap between incomes and the cost of living.
The divergence between the lines halted in 2008. The financial crisis was in part the result of a consumer that had exhausted their ability to use more debt to maintain their lifestyle. Despite the lowest interest rates on record and increases in government transfer payments, the green line has not been able to recover.
The red line in the graph isolates the hockey-stick-like growth of consumer credit since the early 1990’s that was used to maintain our standard of living. Of importance, in 1990 when the blue line went negative, the pace of consumer credit growth accelerated. Since then the pace of credit growth has risen at a much faster rate than the economy and our incomes.
To impress upon you the importance of understanding the role debt has played in supporting our lifestyles, the graph below highlights the magnitude and composition of consumer credit and government transfer payments as a percentage of consumer spending. Combined they now account for 43% of all consumer spending, which in turn accounts for nearly 70% of economic growth. In other words, almost a third of economic growth is reliant on increasing debt.
These charts clearly illustrate that the U.S. consumer has steadily relied on increasing amounts of debt to maintain an artificial standard of living. Through the use of credit, personal and government, U.S. households have pulled forward future consumption. The weight of those outstanding obligations serves as a wet blanket on current and future economic growth.
The financial crisis in 2008 fractured the economy in ways that are clearly evident today. Addressing the troubling debt burden has been postponed through extraordinary stimulus, but the problem has only grown in size. This proves that a debt problem cannot be solved by using more debt.
The Illusion of Prosperity
For the last 50 years, the consumer, that means you and me, have been the most powerful force driving the U.S. economy. Household spending now accounts for almost 70% of economic growth, about 10% more than it did in 1971. Household spending in the U.S. is also approximately 10-15% higher than most other developed nations.
Currently, U.S. economic growth is anemic and still suffering from the after-shocks of the financial crisis. Importantly, much of that weakness is the result of growing stress on consumers. Using the compelling graph below and the data behind it, we can illustrate why the U.S. economy and consumers are struggling.
The blue line on the graph above marks the difference between median disposable income (income less taxes) and the median cost of living. A positive number indicates people at the median made more than their costs of living. In other words, their income exceeds the costs of things like food, housing, and insurance and they have money left over to spend or save. This is often referred to as “having disposable income.” If the number in the above calculation is negative, income is not enough to cover essential expenses.
From at least 1959 to 1971, the blue line above was positive and trending higher. The consumer was in great shape. In 1971 the trend reversed in part due to President Nixon’s actions to remove the U.S. dollar from the gold standard. Unbeknownst to many at the time, that decision allowed the U.S. government to run consistent trade and fiscal deficits while its citizens were able to take on more debt. Other than rampant inflation, there were no immediate consequences. In 1971, following this historic action, the blue line began to trend lower.
By 1990, the median U.S. citizen had less disposable income than the median cost of living; i.e., the blue line turned negative. This trend lower has continued ever since. The 2008 financial crisis proved to be a tipping point where the burden of debt was too much for many consumers to handle. Since 2008 the negative trend in the blue line has further steepened.
You might be thinking, if incomes were less than our standard of living, why did it feel like our standard of living remained stable?
One Word – DEBT.
To help answer that question, we added the green line to the chart. This line adds consumer credit and transfer payments to the blue line. Consumer credit encompasses credit cards, lines of credit, auto loans, student loans, and other non-mortgage forms of consumer debt. Transfer payments are benefits the government bestows upon its citizens in which no goods or services are received in return. Examples include: welfare, food stamps, insurance, and medical benefits. It is important to note that, given the continual deficits run by the U.S. government, these benefits are predominately paid for with borrowed funds.
Note that the green line, unlike the blue line, remains positive and relatively stable from 1959 to 2008, 20 years longer than the blue line. The take away is that consumer and government debt filled the diverging gap between incomes and the cost of living.
The divergence between the lines halted in 2008. The financial crisis was in part the result of a consumer that had exhausted their ability to use more debt to maintain their lifestyle. Despite the lowest interest rates on record and increases in government transfer payments, the green line has not been able to recover.
The red line in the graph isolates the hockey-stick-like growth of consumer credit since the early 1990’s that was used to maintain our standard of living. Of importance, in 1990 when the blue line went negative, the pace of consumer credit growth accelerated. Since then the pace of credit growth has risen at a much faster rate than the economy and our incomes.
To impress upon you the importance of understanding the role debt has played in supporting our lifestyles, the graph below highlights the magnitude and composition of consumer credit and government transfer payments as a percentage of consumer spending. Combined they now account for 43% of all consumer spending, which in turn accounts for nearly 70% of economic growth. In other words, almost a third of economic growth is reliant on increasing debt.
These charts clearly illustrate that the U.S. consumer has steadily relied on increasing amounts of debt to maintain an artificial standard of living. Through the use of credit, personal and government, U.S. households have pulled forward future consumption. The weight of those outstanding obligations serves as a wet blanket on current and future economic growth.
The financial crisis in 2008 fractured the economy in ways that are clearly evident today. Addressing the troubling debt burden has been postponed through extraordinary stimulus, but the problem has only grown in size. This proves that a debt problem cannot be solved by using more debt.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
SC150-4
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47908.htm
Why The United States Is the Fourth Reich
US President Trump’s declaration last week before the UN to “totally destroy” North Korea and his general ranting about American military might is on par with the Nazi Third Reich’s invocation of “Total War”.
The ease with which Trump and his senior officials talk about “military options” towards North Korea, and any other defiant nation, is arguably not just a violation of the UN Charter but also the principles of international law established at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leaders. Any use or threat of war that is not a clear act of self-defense is “aggression”.
The United States under President Donald J Trump is more than ever openly adopting the self-declared “right” to launch wars. Its hysterical claim of “self-defense” with regard to North Korea is a cynical excuse for aggression. When Trump says North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un “won’t be around for much longer” the words are reasonable grounds for the North Koreans to believe the US is “declaring war” – especially in the context of repeated military threats by the Americans of using “all options on the table”.
Trump’s thuggish address to the UN General Assembly was a shocking repudiation of the world body’s official peace-building mission. Trump’s bellicosity had some commentators making comparisons with a Nazi-like oration from Nuremberg rallies circa 1938-39.
American writer Paul Craig Roberts summed up grimly by saying the US is now the Fourth Reich – meaning successor to the Nazi Third Reich.
When someone of Paul Craig Roberts’ stature makes such a grave comment, one has to listen. This is not mere hyperbole bandied about by a novice. Roberts’ establishment credentials are impeccable. He served as a senior member of the Ronald Reagan administration during the 1980s, as assistant secretary in the Treasury Department. Roberts also worked as editor of the Wall Street Journal and is an award-winning author. For such an esteemed former government insider to declare the US as the “Fourth Reich” is a measure of the Rubicon that the country has crossed.
Truth be told, however, the US has been way past the Rubicon into dark territory for a long time. To compare US state power with Nazi Germany is not merely a metaphor. There is a very real historical connection.
This year marks the 70th anniversary since the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created in 1947 in the aftermath of the Second World and the defeat of Nazi Germany. As American author Douglas Valentine recently remarked, the milestone for the CIA represents “70 years of organized crime”.
The CIA and US military leaders at the Pentagon were in many ways the inheritors of Nazi Germany. Thousands of senior Nazi military, intelligence, scientists and engineers were immediately recruited by the Pentagon and nascent CIA after the Second World War.
Operation Paperclip approved by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in late 1945 was vital for the adoption of Nazi missile technology. SS Major Werner Von Braun and hundreds of other rocket experts were instrumental in developing American weapons, as well as the NASA space program.
Operation Sunrise overseen by Allen Dulles and other early CIA figures (the organization was known up to 1947 as the Office of Strategic Studies) set up “rat lines” for top Nazi commanders to escape justice and flee from Europe. Among senior Nazi officers aided and abetted by the American CIA were General Karl Wolff and Major General Reinhard Gehlen.
The liaison between American intelligence and military, and the remnants of the Third Reich, were formative in the organizational creation and Cold War ideology of the CIA and Pentagon towards the Soviet Union. The Americans benefited not only from Nazi gold stolen from European countries, they deployed the same intelligence and covert military techniques of the Third Reich. (See, for example, David Talbot’s book, The Devil's Chessboard, on the formation of the CIA.)
Major General Reinhard Gehlen after his postwar induction in Washington set up the Gehlen Organization with his many contacts among Ukrainian fascists to conduct sabotage operations behind Soviet lines in the decades following the Second World War.
After the Second World War, the United States’ power structure turned into a dichotomy. On the one hand, there was the formal government of elected Congress members and presidents. On the other, was the real power holders in the “secret government” comprising the CIA and the US military-industrial complex.
The “secret government” or the “deep state” of the US has been a law unto itself over the past seven decades. The election of Democrat or Republican politicians has no significant bearing on government policy. The shots are called by the CIA and the “deep state” who answer to the ruling elite of corporate power. Any president who does not comply is dealt with like John F Kennedy, assassinated in November 1963. Hence Trump’s craven capitulation since election.
Funded with Nazi war loot, Russophobia, and contempt for international law, the CIA and the American military inevitably became a killing machine.
Only five years after the Second World War, the Americans went to war in Korea, allegedly “to defeat world communism”. Much of the new military technology that the Americans deployed during the 1950-53 Korean War was developed by the Nazi engineers recruited through Operation Paperclip. The genocidal destruction inflicted on Korea by the Americans was no different from the barbarism used by the Third Reich.
Over the past seven decades, the US rulers have waged overt wars, coups, assassinations and proxy wars against dozens of countries around the world. The global death toll from this American destruction is estimated at 20 million people.
When US leaders extol “American exceptionalism” it is a euphemism for “supremacy” and the “right” to use military violence to further strategic interests. This is no different from the supremacist thinking that the Third Reich invoked to justify its conquest of others.
When Trump and his administration threaten to annihilate North Korea the mindset is not unprecedented. Almost every US leader since the Second World War has promulgated the same unilateral use of violence towards other nations deemed to be “enemy states”. What Trump represents is simply a more naked version of the same aggression.
In addition to the horrendous global death toll from US violence, it should be noted that the US currently spends about $700 billion every year on military – 10 times what Russia spends, or 10 times what the next 9 biggest military-spending nations allocate. The US has military bases in over 100 countries around the world. Over the past quarter-century, it has been in a permanent state of illegal war.
It is by no means an exaggeration to say the US is the Fourth Reich whose direct antecedent is Nazi Germany. The outgrowth of the CIA and Pentagon from Nazi personnel and illicit funds following the Second World War ensured that the US rulers imbued the ideology of the Third Reich.
The legacy of the American Fourth Reich is evident for those with open minds: wars of aggression, genocide, proxy wars, coups, death squads, mass surveillance of citizens, mass media propaganda, and mass torture – all done with impunity and self-righteousness.
Why The United States Is the Fourth Reich
US President Trump’s declaration last week before the UN to “totally destroy” North Korea and his general ranting about American military might is on par with the Nazi Third Reich’s invocation of “Total War”.
The ease with which Trump and his senior officials talk about “military options” towards North Korea, and any other defiant nation, is arguably not just a violation of the UN Charter but also the principles of international law established at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leaders. Any use or threat of war that is not a clear act of self-defense is “aggression”.
The United States under President Donald J Trump is more than ever openly adopting the self-declared “right” to launch wars. Its hysterical claim of “self-defense” with regard to North Korea is a cynical excuse for aggression. When Trump says North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un “won’t be around for much longer” the words are reasonable grounds for the North Koreans to believe the US is “declaring war” – especially in the context of repeated military threats by the Americans of using “all options on the table”.
Trump’s thuggish address to the UN General Assembly was a shocking repudiation of the world body’s official peace-building mission. Trump’s bellicosity had some commentators making comparisons with a Nazi-like oration from Nuremberg rallies circa 1938-39.
American writer Paul Craig Roberts summed up grimly by saying the US is now the Fourth Reich – meaning successor to the Nazi Third Reich.
When someone of Paul Craig Roberts’ stature makes such a grave comment, one has to listen. This is not mere hyperbole bandied about by a novice. Roberts’ establishment credentials are impeccable. He served as a senior member of the Ronald Reagan administration during the 1980s, as assistant secretary in the Treasury Department. Roberts also worked as editor of the Wall Street Journal and is an award-winning author. For such an esteemed former government insider to declare the US as the “Fourth Reich” is a measure of the Rubicon that the country has crossed.
Truth be told, however, the US has been way past the Rubicon into dark territory for a long time. To compare US state power with Nazi Germany is not merely a metaphor. There is a very real historical connection.
This year marks the 70th anniversary since the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created in 1947 in the aftermath of the Second World and the defeat of Nazi Germany. As American author Douglas Valentine recently remarked, the milestone for the CIA represents “70 years of organized crime”.
The CIA and US military leaders at the Pentagon were in many ways the inheritors of Nazi Germany. Thousands of senior Nazi military, intelligence, scientists and engineers were immediately recruited by the Pentagon and nascent CIA after the Second World War.
Operation Paperclip approved by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in late 1945 was vital for the adoption of Nazi missile technology. SS Major Werner Von Braun and hundreds of other rocket experts were instrumental in developing American weapons, as well as the NASA space program.
Operation Sunrise overseen by Allen Dulles and other early CIA figures (the organization was known up to 1947 as the Office of Strategic Studies) set up “rat lines” for top Nazi commanders to escape justice and flee from Europe. Among senior Nazi officers aided and abetted by the American CIA were General Karl Wolff and Major General Reinhard Gehlen.
The liaison between American intelligence and military, and the remnants of the Third Reich, were formative in the organizational creation and Cold War ideology of the CIA and Pentagon towards the Soviet Union. The Americans benefited not only from Nazi gold stolen from European countries, they deployed the same intelligence and covert military techniques of the Third Reich. (See, for example, David Talbot’s book, The Devil's Chessboard, on the formation of the CIA.)
Major General Reinhard Gehlen after his postwar induction in Washington set up the Gehlen Organization with his many contacts among Ukrainian fascists to conduct sabotage operations behind Soviet lines in the decades following the Second World War.
After the Second World War, the United States’ power structure turned into a dichotomy. On the one hand, there was the formal government of elected Congress members and presidents. On the other, was the real power holders in the “secret government” comprising the CIA and the US military-industrial complex.
The “secret government” or the “deep state” of the US has been a law unto itself over the past seven decades. The election of Democrat or Republican politicians has no significant bearing on government policy. The shots are called by the CIA and the “deep state” who answer to the ruling elite of corporate power. Any president who does not comply is dealt with like John F Kennedy, assassinated in November 1963. Hence Trump’s craven capitulation since election.
Funded with Nazi war loot, Russophobia, and contempt for international law, the CIA and the American military inevitably became a killing machine.
Only five years after the Second World War, the Americans went to war in Korea, allegedly “to defeat world communism”. Much of the new military technology that the Americans deployed during the 1950-53 Korean War was developed by the Nazi engineers recruited through Operation Paperclip. The genocidal destruction inflicted on Korea by the Americans was no different from the barbarism used by the Third Reich.
Over the past seven decades, the US rulers have waged overt wars, coups, assassinations and proxy wars against dozens of countries around the world. The global death toll from this American destruction is estimated at 20 million people.
When US leaders extol “American exceptionalism” it is a euphemism for “supremacy” and the “right” to use military violence to further strategic interests. This is no different from the supremacist thinking that the Third Reich invoked to justify its conquest of others.
When Trump and his administration threaten to annihilate North Korea the mindset is not unprecedented. Almost every US leader since the Second World War has promulgated the same unilateral use of violence towards other nations deemed to be “enemy states”. What Trump represents is simply a more naked version of the same aggression.
In addition to the horrendous global death toll from US violence, it should be noted that the US currently spends about $700 billion every year on military – 10 times what Russia spends, or 10 times what the next 9 biggest military-spending nations allocate. The US has military bases in over 100 countries around the world. Over the past quarter-century, it has been in a permanent state of illegal war.
It is by no means an exaggeration to say the US is the Fourth Reich whose direct antecedent is Nazi Germany. The outgrowth of the CIA and Pentagon from Nazi personnel and illicit funds following the Second World War ensured that the US rulers imbued the ideology of the Third Reich.
The legacy of the American Fourth Reich is evident for those with open minds: wars of aggression, genocide, proxy wars, coups, death squads, mass surveillance of citizens, mass media propaganda, and mass torture – all done with impunity and self-righteousness.
Sunday, September 24, 2017
SC150-3
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-killing-of-history/5610376
The Killing of History
One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new way”.
In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism”, Burns’ “entirely new” Vietnam war is presented as “epic, historic work”. Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.
Burns says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans”. Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives.
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings”.
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans – it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.
In the series’ press release in Britain – the BBC will show it – there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans. “We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.
All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the twentieth century: from The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter to Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy”. Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”
I thought about the “decency” and “good faith” when recalling my own first experiences as a young reporter in Vietnam: watching hypnotically as the skin fell off Napalmed peasant children like old parchment, and the ladders of bombs that left trees petrified and festooned with human flesh. General William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as “termites”.
In the early 1970s, I went to Quang Ngai province, where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and 500 men, women and infants were murdered by American troops (Burns prefers “killings”). At the time, this was presented as an aberration: an “American tragedy” (Newsweek ). In this one province, it was estimated that 50,000 people had been slaughtered during the era of American “free fire zones”. Mass homicide. This was not news.
To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly “South Vietnam”, the country America claimed to “save” and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.
The “meaning” of the Vietnam war is no different from the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the levelling of every city in North Korea. The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.
Quoting Robert Taber‘s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said,
“There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.”
Nothing has changed. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on 19 September – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual.
His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people. This is the American Way; only the euphemisms are missing now.
Returning to the US, I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
There is plenty of sound and fury at Trump the odious one, the “fascist”, but almost none at Trump the symptom and caricature of an enduring system of conquest and extremism.
Where are the ghosts of the great anti-war demonstrations that took over Washington in the 1970s? Where is the equivalent of the Freeze Movement that filled the streets of Manhattan in the 1980s, demanding that President Reagan withdraw battlefield nuclear weapons from Europe?
The sheer energy and moral persistence of these great movements largely succeeded; by 1987 Reagan had negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) that effectively ended the Cold War.
Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as “nuclear targeting planning is increased”. The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against
“repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War… All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this.”
But not in America. The thousands who turned out for Senator Bernie Sanders‘ “revolution” in last year’s presidential campaign are collectively mute on these dangers. That most of America’s violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo.
Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia’s western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 signaled the transfer of the majority of America’s naval and air forces to Asia and the Pacific for no purpose other than to confront and provoke China. The Nobel Peace Laureate’s worldwide campaign of assassinations is arguably the most extensive campaign of terrorism since 9/11.
What is known in the US as “the left” has effectively allied with the darkest recesses of institutional power, notably the Pentagon and the CIA, to see off a peace deal between Trump and Vladimir Putin and to reinstate Russia as an enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The true scandal is the insidious assumption of power by sinister war-making vested interests for which no American voted. The rapid ascendancy of the Pentagon and the surveillance agencies under Obama represented an historic shift of power in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg rightly called it a coup. The three generals running Trump are its witness.
All of this fails to penetrate those “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics”, as Luciana Bohne noted memorably. Commodified and market-tested, “diversity” is the new liberal brand, not the class people serve regardless of their gender and skin colour: not the responsibility of all to stop a barbaric war to end all wars.
“How did it fucking come to this?” says Michael Moore in his Broadway show, Terms of My Surrender, a vaudeville for the disaffected set against a backdrop of Trump as Big Brother.
I admired Moore’s film, Roger & Me, about the economic and social devastation of his hometown of Flint, Michigan, and Sicko, his investigation into the corruption of healthcare in America.
The night I saw his show, his happy-clappy audience cheered his reassurance that “we are the majority!” and calls to “impeach Trump, a liar and a fascist!” His message seemed to be that had you held your nose and voted for Hillary Clinton, life would be predictable again.
He may be right. Instead of merely abusing the world, as Trump does, the Great Obliterator might have attacked Iran and lobbed missiles at Putin, whom she likened to Hitler: a particular profanity given the 27 million Russians who died in Hitler’s invasion.
“Listen up,” said Moore, “putting aside what our governments do, Americans are really loved by the world!”
There was a silence.
The Killing of History
One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new way”.
In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism”, Burns’ “entirely new” Vietnam war is presented as “epic, historic work”. Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.
Burns says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans”. Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives.
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings”.
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans – it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.
In the series’ press release in Britain – the BBC will show it – there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans. “We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.
All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the twentieth century: from The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter to Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy”. Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”
I thought about the “decency” and “good faith” when recalling my own first experiences as a young reporter in Vietnam: watching hypnotically as the skin fell off Napalmed peasant children like old parchment, and the ladders of bombs that left trees petrified and festooned with human flesh. General William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as “termites”.
In the early 1970s, I went to Quang Ngai province, where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and 500 men, women and infants were murdered by American troops (Burns prefers “killings”). At the time, this was presented as an aberration: an “American tragedy” (Newsweek ). In this one province, it was estimated that 50,000 people had been slaughtered during the era of American “free fire zones”. Mass homicide. This was not news.
To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly “South Vietnam”, the country America claimed to “save” and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.
The “meaning” of the Vietnam war is no different from the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the levelling of every city in North Korea. The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.
Quoting Robert Taber‘s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said,
“There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.”
Nothing has changed. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on 19 September – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual.
His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people. This is the American Way; only the euphemisms are missing now.
Returning to the US, I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
There is plenty of sound and fury at Trump the odious one, the “fascist”, but almost none at Trump the symptom and caricature of an enduring system of conquest and extremism.
Where are the ghosts of the great anti-war demonstrations that took over Washington in the 1970s? Where is the equivalent of the Freeze Movement that filled the streets of Manhattan in the 1980s, demanding that President Reagan withdraw battlefield nuclear weapons from Europe?
The sheer energy and moral persistence of these great movements largely succeeded; by 1987 Reagan had negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) that effectively ended the Cold War.
Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as “nuclear targeting planning is increased”. The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against
“repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War… All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this.”
But not in America. The thousands who turned out for Senator Bernie Sanders‘ “revolution” in last year’s presidential campaign are collectively mute on these dangers. That most of America’s violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo.
Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia’s western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 signaled the transfer of the majority of America’s naval and air forces to Asia and the Pacific for no purpose other than to confront and provoke China. The Nobel Peace Laureate’s worldwide campaign of assassinations is arguably the most extensive campaign of terrorism since 9/11.
What is known in the US as “the left” has effectively allied with the darkest recesses of institutional power, notably the Pentagon and the CIA, to see off a peace deal between Trump and Vladimir Putin and to reinstate Russia as an enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The true scandal is the insidious assumption of power by sinister war-making vested interests for which no American voted. The rapid ascendancy of the Pentagon and the surveillance agencies under Obama represented an historic shift of power in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg rightly called it a coup. The three generals running Trump are its witness.
All of this fails to penetrate those “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics”, as Luciana Bohne noted memorably. Commodified and market-tested, “diversity” is the new liberal brand, not the class people serve regardless of their gender and skin colour: not the responsibility of all to stop a barbaric war to end all wars.
“How did it fucking come to this?” says Michael Moore in his Broadway show, Terms of My Surrender, a vaudeville for the disaffected set against a backdrop of Trump as Big Brother.
I admired Moore’s film, Roger & Me, about the economic and social devastation of his hometown of Flint, Michigan, and Sicko, his investigation into the corruption of healthcare in America.
The night I saw his show, his happy-clappy audience cheered his reassurance that “we are the majority!” and calls to “impeach Trump, a liar and a fascist!” His message seemed to be that had you held your nose and voted for Hillary Clinton, life would be predictable again.
He may be right. Instead of merely abusing the world, as Trump does, the Great Obliterator might have attacked Iran and lobbed missiles at Putin, whom she likened to Hitler: a particular profanity given the 27 million Russians who died in Hitler’s invasion.
“Listen up,” said Moore, “putting aside what our governments do, Americans are really loved by the world!”
There was a silence.
Saturday, September 23, 2017
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/incoherent-president-reassures-un-that-us-policy-is-insane/5610158
Incoherent President Reassures UN that US Policy Is Insane
“If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph.” – Minority President Donald Trump, September 19, 2017, addressing the United Nations
With stunningly unintended precision, about a third of the way into his UN speech, President Trump encapsulated the current brutal reality of the United States in late 2017, where the righteous many do not confront the wicked few and evil oozes its slow and merciless triumph through the body politic. Or perhaps the “righteous many” is another myth and the “wicked few” are the true majority. Wherever one looks, the news is not reassuring, whether it’s climate change, civil rights, police state treatment of minorities, rewarding the rich for their wealth, punishing the poor for their poverty, attacking voter rights, or bloating a military that specializes in killing civilians. Trump’s next sentence drove home the crucifying irony of the American moment:
“When decent people and nations become bystanders to history, the forces of destruction only gather power and strength.”
Yes, they do. Yes, we do. We live now in a time of literal perpetual war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and many of the other 100-plus sovereign states that have US boots on the ground. Before 9/11, the US was at war only most of the time, more spectacularly, but with no better results since 1945. This is not good; surely most UN members appreciate that, without having the nerve to say so. They did not applaud when Trump boasted:
We will be spending almost $700 billion on our military and defense.
$700,000,000,000 is a lot of money, and it doesn’t even include a big chunk for our nuclear arsenal that comes from the Energy Department. $700 billion is more money than anyone else spends on its military. $700 billion is roughly five times what China spends, nine times what Saudi Arabia spends, ten times what Russia spends, eleven times what India, France, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom spend. $700 billion is more than what these countries altogether spend. For Americans, military spending is an addiction that no longer produces a high, only a craving. Like any addiction, it is deeply destructive. And we knew that once, but now we’re junkies deeply in denial of our self-destruction. Endless war and out of control military spending have done much to destroy what we once believed was best about the US. Eisenhower belatedly warned us, but he was far from the first. Back in 1795, when the United States was three years old, James Madison wrote:
Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debt and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few…. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
That’s pretty much the way it’s turning out, except there’s a possibility that the many are actually in favor of being dominated by the few. Or they’re intimidated. Or they’re mystified. Whatever is happening with the American people, Donald Trump represented them at the UN with a 41-minute pastiche of clichés, political pablum, incomprehensible nonsense, and meaningless feel-good rhetoric. (All the quotes that follow are from the official White House posting of the speech, reportedly written by 32-year-old hardliner Stephen Miller, a senior advisor for policy.) The speech begins in a curious campaign mode as Trump assures the representatives of 192 other countries that, much to their presumed relief:
The American people are strong and resilient, and they will emerge from these hardships more determined than ever before.
This referred to the US suffering from hurricanes. Trump said nothing of the suffering of Caribbean islands from hurricanes, or Bangladesh from flooding, or Mexico from earthquakes, or any other pain and anguish in the world. America first.
Then came a sloppy, unpersuasive best-of-times/worst-of-times passage in which Trump threat-mongered “terrorists and extremists” and then, with presumed unawareness, described the United States of recent decades:
Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.
The next sentence was perhaps the best of several instances of impenetrable nonsense:
Authority and authoritarian powers seek to collapse the values, the systems, and alliances that prevented conflict and tilted the world toward freedom since World War II.
The record includes dozens of wars since 1945, wars that the US promoted or participated in, with millions of casualties. The US has been at war 93% of the time since 1792. The US has been in covert or overt war, or both, or several, pretty much continuously since 1945. Soon after that, Trump launched into hyperbolic fantasy:
We have it in our power, should we so choose, to lift millions from poverty, to help our citizens realize their dreams, and to ensure that new generations of children are raised free from violence, hatred, and fear.
These are fine sentiments, to be sure, but not what most members of the UN are committed to achieving, and surely not what the Trump administration is about. But the passage was preamble to what struggled to be the thematic thread of the speech, the purported pillars of the Marshall Plan, “three beautiful pillars … peace, sovereignty, security, and prosperity.” Trump offered no plan to achieve these “pillars,” nor did he make a coherent argument beyond the platitudinous:
Our success depends on a coalition of strong and independent nations that embrace their sovereignty to promote security, prosperity, and peace for themselves and for the world.
Trump ran through several descriptions of what sovereign nations do without addressing the apparent contradiction inherent in the US defining how other nations should be sovereign. In this context, God made a first of several odd appearances before this most multicultural of assemblies:
And strong, sovereign nations allow individuals to flourish in the fullness of the life intended by God.
In concluding his litany of fuzzballs, Trump arrived at his first applause line (there were four), although why this line drew applause is somewhat mysterious:
As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like you, as the leaders of your countries will always, and should always, put your countries first. (Applause.)
The sentiment must surely appeal to Saudi Arabia, Burma (Myanmar), Israel, or Egypt as much as to Cuba, Yemen, Venezuela, or North Korea, but Trump has at least a double standard for which leaders he will allow to “put your countries first.” Trump took a cheap shot at both Russia and China, but did it in a single sentence without any indication if he actually meant anything by it:
We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea.
As widely reported, Trump gave major attention to North Korea “for the starvation deaths of millions of North Koreans, and for the imprisonment, torture, killing, and oppression of countless more.” That sounds like a familiar sovereign pattern, especially if you substitute “Native Americans” for “North Koreans.” Trump did not go there, of course, preferring instead to threaten genocide, unless the UN could find some alternative:
That’s what the United Nations is all about; that’s what the United Nations is for. Let’s see how they do.
“Let’s see how they do?” The US is no longer in the UN? Trump’s Freudian slip is showing. Trump’s next big thing was Iran, about which he pretty much lied shamelessly, even blaming Iran for “Yemen’s civil war,” which doesn’t really exist. Yemen is a humanitarian catastrophe made obscenely worse by constant Saudi bombing with US collusion and support since it began in 2015. In this, Trump is as much a war criminal as Obama.
Once again casting the US as saintly, Trump disingenuously talked about all the US had done to help refugees, especially refugees from Syria and Iraq. You know, the ones he tried to ban. In this context he offered a priceless rationalization for American inhumanity:
For the cost of resettling one refugee in the United States, we can assist more than 10 in their home region. Out of the goodness of our hearts, we offer financial assistance to hosting countries in the region, and we support recent agreements of the G20 nations that will seek to host refugees as close to their home countries as possible. This is the safe, responsible, and humanitarian approach.
That’s a fairly clever, if transparent way of saying: keep those raghead terrorists in their own countries, or at least the ones next door. In the context of trashing Cuba and Venezuela, Trump uttered a bald-faced lie:
America stands with every person living under a brutal regime.
That’s never been true, as Palestinians in Gaza know, as Yemenis know, as Rohingya in Burma know, and black Americans in Missouri know, as native Americans know, as any sentient human should know. In this context, the ruthless hypocrisy of Trump’s closing stands in bold relief:
So let this be our mission, and let this be our message to the world: We will fight together, sacrifice together, and stand together for peace, for freedom, for justice, for family, for humanity, and for the almighty God who made us all.
Really? Is that why Trump was whining earlier in this speech about how much the US paid to keep the UN going?
Trump’s appearance at the UN was just another confirmation of just how awful he and his administration are, and probably no one has a clear understanding of the full extent of the Trump awfulness....
Incoherent President Reassures UN that US Policy Is Insane
“If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph.” – Minority President Donald Trump, September 19, 2017, addressing the United Nations
With stunningly unintended precision, about a third of the way into his UN speech, President Trump encapsulated the current brutal reality of the United States in late 2017, where the righteous many do not confront the wicked few and evil oozes its slow and merciless triumph through the body politic. Or perhaps the “righteous many” is another myth and the “wicked few” are the true majority. Wherever one looks, the news is not reassuring, whether it’s climate change, civil rights, police state treatment of minorities, rewarding the rich for their wealth, punishing the poor for their poverty, attacking voter rights, or bloating a military that specializes in killing civilians. Trump’s next sentence drove home the crucifying irony of the American moment:
“When decent people and nations become bystanders to history, the forces of destruction only gather power and strength.”
Yes, they do. Yes, we do. We live now in a time of literal perpetual war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and many of the other 100-plus sovereign states that have US boots on the ground. Before 9/11, the US was at war only most of the time, more spectacularly, but with no better results since 1945. This is not good; surely most UN members appreciate that, without having the nerve to say so. They did not applaud when Trump boasted:
We will be spending almost $700 billion on our military and defense.
$700,000,000,000 is a lot of money, and it doesn’t even include a big chunk for our nuclear arsenal that comes from the Energy Department. $700 billion is more money than anyone else spends on its military. $700 billion is roughly five times what China spends, nine times what Saudi Arabia spends, ten times what Russia spends, eleven times what India, France, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom spend. $700 billion is more than what these countries altogether spend. For Americans, military spending is an addiction that no longer produces a high, only a craving. Like any addiction, it is deeply destructive. And we knew that once, but now we’re junkies deeply in denial of our self-destruction. Endless war and out of control military spending have done much to destroy what we once believed was best about the US. Eisenhower belatedly warned us, but he was far from the first. Back in 1795, when the United States was three years old, James Madison wrote:
Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debt and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few…. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
That’s pretty much the way it’s turning out, except there’s a possibility that the many are actually in favor of being dominated by the few. Or they’re intimidated. Or they’re mystified. Whatever is happening with the American people, Donald Trump represented them at the UN with a 41-minute pastiche of clichés, political pablum, incomprehensible nonsense, and meaningless feel-good rhetoric. (All the quotes that follow are from the official White House posting of the speech, reportedly written by 32-year-old hardliner Stephen Miller, a senior advisor for policy.) The speech begins in a curious campaign mode as Trump assures the representatives of 192 other countries that, much to their presumed relief:
The American people are strong and resilient, and they will emerge from these hardships more determined than ever before.
This referred to the US suffering from hurricanes. Trump said nothing of the suffering of Caribbean islands from hurricanes, or Bangladesh from flooding, or Mexico from earthquakes, or any other pain and anguish in the world. America first.
Then came a sloppy, unpersuasive best-of-times/worst-of-times passage in which Trump threat-mongered “terrorists and extremists” and then, with presumed unawareness, described the United States of recent decades:
Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.
The next sentence was perhaps the best of several instances of impenetrable nonsense:
Authority and authoritarian powers seek to collapse the values, the systems, and alliances that prevented conflict and tilted the world toward freedom since World War II.
The record includes dozens of wars since 1945, wars that the US promoted or participated in, with millions of casualties. The US has been at war 93% of the time since 1792. The US has been in covert or overt war, or both, or several, pretty much continuously since 1945. Soon after that, Trump launched into hyperbolic fantasy:
We have it in our power, should we so choose, to lift millions from poverty, to help our citizens realize their dreams, and to ensure that new generations of children are raised free from violence, hatred, and fear.
These are fine sentiments, to be sure, but not what most members of the UN are committed to achieving, and surely not what the Trump administration is about. But the passage was preamble to what struggled to be the thematic thread of the speech, the purported pillars of the Marshall Plan, “three beautiful pillars … peace, sovereignty, security, and prosperity.” Trump offered no plan to achieve these “pillars,” nor did he make a coherent argument beyond the platitudinous:
Our success depends on a coalition of strong and independent nations that embrace their sovereignty to promote security, prosperity, and peace for themselves and for the world.
Trump ran through several descriptions of what sovereign nations do without addressing the apparent contradiction inherent in the US defining how other nations should be sovereign. In this context, God made a first of several odd appearances before this most multicultural of assemblies:
And strong, sovereign nations allow individuals to flourish in the fullness of the life intended by God.
In concluding his litany of fuzzballs, Trump arrived at his first applause line (there were four), although why this line drew applause is somewhat mysterious:
As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like you, as the leaders of your countries will always, and should always, put your countries first. (Applause.)
The sentiment must surely appeal to Saudi Arabia, Burma (Myanmar), Israel, or Egypt as much as to Cuba, Yemen, Venezuela, or North Korea, but Trump has at least a double standard for which leaders he will allow to “put your countries first.” Trump took a cheap shot at both Russia and China, but did it in a single sentence without any indication if he actually meant anything by it:
We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea.
As widely reported, Trump gave major attention to North Korea “for the starvation deaths of millions of North Koreans, and for the imprisonment, torture, killing, and oppression of countless more.” That sounds like a familiar sovereign pattern, especially if you substitute “Native Americans” for “North Koreans.” Trump did not go there, of course, preferring instead to threaten genocide, unless the UN could find some alternative:
That’s what the United Nations is all about; that’s what the United Nations is for. Let’s see how they do.
“Let’s see how they do?” The US is no longer in the UN? Trump’s Freudian slip is showing. Trump’s next big thing was Iran, about which he pretty much lied shamelessly, even blaming Iran for “Yemen’s civil war,” which doesn’t really exist. Yemen is a humanitarian catastrophe made obscenely worse by constant Saudi bombing with US collusion and support since it began in 2015. In this, Trump is as much a war criminal as Obama.
Once again casting the US as saintly, Trump disingenuously talked about all the US had done to help refugees, especially refugees from Syria and Iraq. You know, the ones he tried to ban. In this context he offered a priceless rationalization for American inhumanity:
For the cost of resettling one refugee in the United States, we can assist more than 10 in their home region. Out of the goodness of our hearts, we offer financial assistance to hosting countries in the region, and we support recent agreements of the G20 nations that will seek to host refugees as close to their home countries as possible. This is the safe, responsible, and humanitarian approach.
That’s a fairly clever, if transparent way of saying: keep those raghead terrorists in their own countries, or at least the ones next door. In the context of trashing Cuba and Venezuela, Trump uttered a bald-faced lie:
America stands with every person living under a brutal regime.
That’s never been true, as Palestinians in Gaza know, as Yemenis know, as Rohingya in Burma know, and black Americans in Missouri know, as native Americans know, as any sentient human should know. In this context, the ruthless hypocrisy of Trump’s closing stands in bold relief:
So let this be our mission, and let this be our message to the world: We will fight together, sacrifice together, and stand together for peace, for freedom, for justice, for family, for humanity, and for the almighty God who made us all.
Really? Is that why Trump was whining earlier in this speech about how much the US paid to keep the UN going?
Trump’s appearance at the UN was just another confirmation of just how awful he and his administration are, and probably no one has a clear understanding of the full extent of the Trump awfulness....
SC150-1
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-day-of-the-generals-winning-armageddon/5610127
The Day of the Generals: Winning Armageddon
In a room, somewhere deep inside the Pentagon generals and admirals met recently in order to prepare an assessment for the United States Senate Armed Services Committee. Present at the metering were General Mark Milley, the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, the Commandant of the Marine Corps General Robert Neller, and U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General David L. Goldfein. At such a meeting there’s no doubt that Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford attended seeing he’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The agenda for this meeting was serious as a heart attack – America’s most brilliant and powerful military men gathered that day to discuss Armageddon.
The minutes of this fateful meeting are top secret. Only a handful of people will ever know what was discussed. But the end result of the strategy session was revealed on September 15, 2017 before the people of the United States. The top generals of the most powerful nation on Earth advised congress that America could in fact win an all-out war with Russia and China. It must have been a scene right out of Director Stanley Kubrick’s classic Cold War film, Dr. Strangelove. I was not there, so I can only imagine the gathering of war hawks, the stoic expertise and military intellect, and the obtuse arrogance being conveyed across the congressional forum that day. The vision makes me wonder, “Who in the hell ordered such an assessment in the first place?” But I think we all know the answer.
General Milley expressed his only concern over World War III by citing the U.S. Army’s “lack of resources and training to execute America’s national security strategy without high military risk.” Admiral Richardson agreed with Milley, but his level of confidence in the U.S. Navy’s dominance seemed somehow higher. Milley told committee:
“I concur with Gen. Milley. If we get into one of those conflicts, we’ll win, but it going to take a lot longer than we’d like and it’s going to cost a lot more in terms of dollars and in casualties.”
Marine General Neller parroted these opinions, only with a typical “Jar Head” obtuseness and psychosomatic bravado proclaiming America’s current force array is “effective” against counterinsurgent forces around the world. I am assuming the General means the Taliban now resurgent in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda that’s being supported in Syria, and the ultimate enemy ISIL, which Russia has all but destroyed on the ground. I’ll not get into the Marine mentality, they are my shipmates after all. As for the Air Force’s General David L. Goldfein, the former combat pilot’s assessment showed that flying an airplane does not qualify one to be a military bean counter. General Goldfein also concurred with the others but in an overcomplicated way, as if he were the accountant of the group. In short, the man shot down over Serbia when America destroyed Yugoslavia earned his pay September 15th by stating the plainly obvious – World War III is a high-risk endeavor. No shit General.
My fellow Earthlings, it’s abundantly clear that the United States military industrial complex now runs America. The meeting before the U.S. Senate was simply a formality. A psycho-thriller being played out before an audience asleep in the back row of the theater. With Russia’s Vladimir Putin pleading with every breath for discourse and sanity, and after Russia’s military machine has been forced into high alert, America’s top Generals have been put in charge. Let me cite the Army’s General Milley on his plea for more money and weapons in order to abate the “dire consequences” of this Armageddon:
“The butcher’s bill is paid in the blood of American soldiers for unready forces. We have a long history of that— Kasserine Pass, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Tarawa, Task Force Smith in the Korean War. It goes all the way back to Bull Run—Lincoln thought he was going to fight a war for 90 days. Wars are often thought to be short when they begin—they’re not. They’re often thought to cost less than they end up costing and they end up with outcomes and take turns you never know. It’s a dangerous thing.”
Let me make something abundantly clear here. The “generals” did not prepare their assessments for a waiting U.S. Senate committee, for those same senators work in collusion with the military and the industrial complex, everyone knows this. This dog and pony show was orchestrated for one audience only – the idiots who believe our system works like it should – the American people. Look at the narrative. It’s all PR and propaganda dialogue, grade school fodder crafted to appease convenience store workers. A “dangerous thing”, indeed. Milley went on pandering for a brand new arms race, a brand new Cold War, in suggesting force build up and reequipping for major conflict. We’re right back to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative. For those of you who believe this is all saber rattling, this Defense Intelligence Agency report shows us the military industrialists and the U.S. President are aware of the ultimate outcome. Part of the report addresses Vladimir Putin’s “preparedness” in the event of Armageddon to the extent he is getting ready just in case. The fact of the matter is that the deep underground bunkers America’s defense industry cites as “Putin’s Armageddon protection” were built during Soviet times.
Finally, if you read about the new role of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, then you’ll understand the takeover of American policy by the deep state is complete. While his colleagues were busy pandering the public for more guns, ships, and missiles, America’s top general was politicking in Asia with career bureaucrats like South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Gen. Fang Fenghui, chief of the general staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. So, with North Korea, Russia, and Iran in the crosshairs of new US sanctions, the Trump administration takes aim with real killing weapons too. Generals as diplomats, and idiot U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley as cheerleader for the ultimate game of war? The insanity is at “Biblical” on the reality meter today. Half the world is on the brink of starving, and most of the rest feels milked dry by the elitist order, so naturally World War III must come. All I have left to offer is this.
“I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.” – Julian Assange
The Day of the Generals: Winning Armageddon
In a room, somewhere deep inside the Pentagon generals and admirals met recently in order to prepare an assessment for the United States Senate Armed Services Committee. Present at the metering were General Mark Milley, the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, the Commandant of the Marine Corps General Robert Neller, and U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General David L. Goldfein. At such a meeting there’s no doubt that Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford attended seeing he’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The agenda for this meeting was serious as a heart attack – America’s most brilliant and powerful military men gathered that day to discuss Armageddon.
The minutes of this fateful meeting are top secret. Only a handful of people will ever know what was discussed. But the end result of the strategy session was revealed on September 15, 2017 before the people of the United States. The top generals of the most powerful nation on Earth advised congress that America could in fact win an all-out war with Russia and China. It must have been a scene right out of Director Stanley Kubrick’s classic Cold War film, Dr. Strangelove. I was not there, so I can only imagine the gathering of war hawks, the stoic expertise and military intellect, and the obtuse arrogance being conveyed across the congressional forum that day. The vision makes me wonder, “Who in the hell ordered such an assessment in the first place?” But I think we all know the answer.
General Milley expressed his only concern over World War III by citing the U.S. Army’s “lack of resources and training to execute America’s national security strategy without high military risk.” Admiral Richardson agreed with Milley, but his level of confidence in the U.S. Navy’s dominance seemed somehow higher. Milley told committee:
“I concur with Gen. Milley. If we get into one of those conflicts, we’ll win, but it going to take a lot longer than we’d like and it’s going to cost a lot more in terms of dollars and in casualties.”
Marine General Neller parroted these opinions, only with a typical “Jar Head” obtuseness and psychosomatic bravado proclaiming America’s current force array is “effective” against counterinsurgent forces around the world. I am assuming the General means the Taliban now resurgent in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda that’s being supported in Syria, and the ultimate enemy ISIL, which Russia has all but destroyed on the ground. I’ll not get into the Marine mentality, they are my shipmates after all. As for the Air Force’s General David L. Goldfein, the former combat pilot’s assessment showed that flying an airplane does not qualify one to be a military bean counter. General Goldfein also concurred with the others but in an overcomplicated way, as if he were the accountant of the group. In short, the man shot down over Serbia when America destroyed Yugoslavia earned his pay September 15th by stating the plainly obvious – World War III is a high-risk endeavor. No shit General.
My fellow Earthlings, it’s abundantly clear that the United States military industrial complex now runs America. The meeting before the U.S. Senate was simply a formality. A psycho-thriller being played out before an audience asleep in the back row of the theater. With Russia’s Vladimir Putin pleading with every breath for discourse and sanity, and after Russia’s military machine has been forced into high alert, America’s top Generals have been put in charge. Let me cite the Army’s General Milley on his plea for more money and weapons in order to abate the “dire consequences” of this Armageddon:
“The butcher’s bill is paid in the blood of American soldiers for unready forces. We have a long history of that— Kasserine Pass, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Tarawa, Task Force Smith in the Korean War. It goes all the way back to Bull Run—Lincoln thought he was going to fight a war for 90 days. Wars are often thought to be short when they begin—they’re not. They’re often thought to cost less than they end up costing and they end up with outcomes and take turns you never know. It’s a dangerous thing.”
Let me make something abundantly clear here. The “generals” did not prepare their assessments for a waiting U.S. Senate committee, for those same senators work in collusion with the military and the industrial complex, everyone knows this. This dog and pony show was orchestrated for one audience only – the idiots who believe our system works like it should – the American people. Look at the narrative. It’s all PR and propaganda dialogue, grade school fodder crafted to appease convenience store workers. A “dangerous thing”, indeed. Milley went on pandering for a brand new arms race, a brand new Cold War, in suggesting force build up and reequipping for major conflict. We’re right back to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative. For those of you who believe this is all saber rattling, this Defense Intelligence Agency report shows us the military industrialists and the U.S. President are aware of the ultimate outcome. Part of the report addresses Vladimir Putin’s “preparedness” in the event of Armageddon to the extent he is getting ready just in case. The fact of the matter is that the deep underground bunkers America’s defense industry cites as “Putin’s Armageddon protection” were built during Soviet times.
Finally, if you read about the new role of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, then you’ll understand the takeover of American policy by the deep state is complete. While his colleagues were busy pandering the public for more guns, ships, and missiles, America’s top general was politicking in Asia with career bureaucrats like South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Gen. Fang Fenghui, chief of the general staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. So, with North Korea, Russia, and Iran in the crosshairs of new US sanctions, the Trump administration takes aim with real killing weapons too. Generals as diplomats, and idiot U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley as cheerleader for the ultimate game of war? The insanity is at “Biblical” on the reality meter today. Half the world is on the brink of starving, and most of the rest feels milked dry by the elitist order, so naturally World War III must come. All I have left to offer is this.
“I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.” – Julian Assange
Friday, September 22, 2017
SC149-15
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47879.htm
How the US Became a Warmonger Police State
Professor David Ray Griffin is a tenacious person. He has written a number of carefully researched books that demonstrate the extraordinary shortcomings in the official account of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the subsequent anthrax attack. He has provided the mountains of evidence completely ignored by the US government’s account and the presstitute media.
In his recently published latest book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World , Professor Griffin demonstrates how 9/11 was used by the Zionist Neoconservatives, the Cheney/Bush regime, and the military/security complex with the complicity of Congress and the US media to create Islamophobia among the American public in order to launch wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and provinces of Pakistan with Iran in the crosshairs. These wars are based on lies and fabricated “evidence,” on determination to control pipelines and oil flows, on maximizing profits for the military/security corporations in which Cheney has a personal interest, and on extending neoconservative hegemony over the world.
One consequence has been the destruction of US constitutional protections that protect liberty and violations of US and international law such as the laws against torture.
Another consequence has been millions of displaced refugees from Washington’s wars over-running the countries of Europe.
Indeed, Europe faces a “Camp of the Saints” situation, and the US now has a police state in which all citizens are subject to: indefinite detention (imprisonment) on suspicion alone without conviction or evidence presented to a court; assassination on suspicion alone without due process of law; and total violation of privacy, including body cavities, without presentation of a court warrant. American women are now subjected to having their vaginas examined by police in public on the roadside.
The hoax “war on terror” has turned America into a Gestapo state. Not many Americans directly experience the consequences, but they will be denied valid information as the Gestapo American state closes down all dissent on the grounds that it is harmful to national security. People who speak their minds will find that they no longer have First Amendment protection.
Every passing day truth is less and less prevalent in the United States. Democratic control over the government is already nonexistent. Essentially, Americans live in the Fourth Reich which has already budded and is now blossoming.
Wars and their expense will continue to multiply as the military/security complex uses manufactured “threats” to continue the excessive flow of American resources into more weapons to be used in the destruction of more countries.
Professor Griffin provides the details of the story of how the United States ceased to be a free country ruled by law and became instead a threat both to American civil liberty and to life on earth.
In world polls 25% of the respondents recognize the United States as the greatest threat to peace in the world. This is 5 times higher than those who regard North Korea and Iran as threats, much less Venezuela which does not even register. When Trump gave his UN speech he should have said that the United States, controlled as it is by the CIA and military/security complex, is the great threat that the entire world faces, including Americans.
But Trump has betrayed us. He accepted the aggressive militarist neoconservative line that the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us, to no avail, in 1961, 56 years ago, is the hegemonic police power chosen by History to protect the peace of the world.
It must reassure the 7 or 8 countries bombed into the stone age by Washington’s might that their destruction is “protecting the peace of the world.”
How the US Became a Warmonger Police State
Professor David Ray Griffin is a tenacious person. He has written a number of carefully researched books that demonstrate the extraordinary shortcomings in the official account of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the subsequent anthrax attack. He has provided the mountains of evidence completely ignored by the US government’s account and the presstitute media.
In his recently published latest book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World , Professor Griffin demonstrates how 9/11 was used by the Zionist Neoconservatives, the Cheney/Bush regime, and the military/security complex with the complicity of Congress and the US media to create Islamophobia among the American public in order to launch wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and provinces of Pakistan with Iran in the crosshairs. These wars are based on lies and fabricated “evidence,” on determination to control pipelines and oil flows, on maximizing profits for the military/security corporations in which Cheney has a personal interest, and on extending neoconservative hegemony over the world.
One consequence has been the destruction of US constitutional protections that protect liberty and violations of US and international law such as the laws against torture.
Another consequence has been millions of displaced refugees from Washington’s wars over-running the countries of Europe.
Indeed, Europe faces a “Camp of the Saints” situation, and the US now has a police state in which all citizens are subject to: indefinite detention (imprisonment) on suspicion alone without conviction or evidence presented to a court; assassination on suspicion alone without due process of law; and total violation of privacy, including body cavities, without presentation of a court warrant. American women are now subjected to having their vaginas examined by police in public on the roadside.
The hoax “war on terror” has turned America into a Gestapo state. Not many Americans directly experience the consequences, but they will be denied valid information as the Gestapo American state closes down all dissent on the grounds that it is harmful to national security. People who speak their minds will find that they no longer have First Amendment protection.
Every passing day truth is less and less prevalent in the United States. Democratic control over the government is already nonexistent. Essentially, Americans live in the Fourth Reich which has already budded and is now blossoming.
Wars and their expense will continue to multiply as the military/security complex uses manufactured “threats” to continue the excessive flow of American resources into more weapons to be used in the destruction of more countries.
Professor Griffin provides the details of the story of how the United States ceased to be a free country ruled by law and became instead a threat both to American civil liberty and to life on earth.
In world polls 25% of the respondents recognize the United States as the greatest threat to peace in the world. This is 5 times higher than those who regard North Korea and Iran as threats, much less Venezuela which does not even register. When Trump gave his UN speech he should have said that the United States, controlled as it is by the CIA and military/security complex, is the great threat that the entire world faces, including Americans.
But Trump has betrayed us. He accepted the aggressive militarist neoconservative line that the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us, to no avail, in 1961, 56 years ago, is the hegemonic police power chosen by History to protect the peace of the world.
It must reassure the 7 or 8 countries bombed into the stone age by Washington’s might that their destruction is “protecting the peace of the world.”
SC149-14
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/in-the-murk/
In the Murk
Welcome to America’s first experiment in the World Made By Hand lifestyle. Where else is it going? Watch closely.
Ricardo Ramos, the director of the beleaguered, government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, told CNN Thursday that the island’s power infrastructure had been basically “destroyed” and will take months to come back
“Basically destroyed.” That’s about as basic as it gets civilization-wise.
Residents, Mr. Ramos said, would need to change the way they cook and cool off. For entertainment, old-school would be the best approach, he said. “It’s a good time for dads to buy a ball and a glove and change the way you entertain your children.”
Meaning, I guess, no more playing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard on-screen because you’ll be living it — though one wonders where will the money come from to buy the ball and glove? Few Puerto Ricans will be going to work with the power off. And the island’s public finances were in disarray sufficient to drive it into federal court last May to set in motion a legal receivership that amounted to bankruptcy in all but name. The commonwealth, a US territory, was in default for $74 billion in bonded debt, plus another $49 billion in unfunded pension obligations.
So, Puerto Rico already faced a crisis pre-Hurricane Maria, with its dodgy electric grid and crumbling infrastructure: roads, bridges, water and sewage systems. Bankruptcy put it in a poor position to issue new bonds for public works which are generally paid for with public borrowing. Who, exactly, would buy the new bonds? I hear readers whispering, “the Federal Reserve.” Which is a pretty good clue to understanding the circle-jerk that American finance has become.
Some sort of bailout is unavoidable, though President Trump tweeted “No Bailout for Puerto Rico” after the May bankruptcy proceeding. Things have changed and the shelf-life of Trumpian tweets is famously brief. But the crisis may actually strain the ability of the federal government to pretend it can cover the cost of every calamity that strikes the nation — at least not without casting doubt on the soundness of the dollar. And not a few bonafide states are also whirling around the bankruptcy drain: Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, Kentucky.
Constitutionally states are not permitted to declare bankruptcy, though counties and municipalities can. Congress would have to change the law to allow it. But states can default on their bonds and other obligations. Surely there would be some kind of fiscal and political hell to pay if they go that route. Nobody really knows what might happen in a state as big and complex as Illinois, which has been paying its way for decades by borrowing from the future. Suddenly, the future is here and nobody has a plan for it.
The case for the federal government is not so different. It, too, only manages to pay its bondholders via bookkeeping hocuspocus, and its colossal unfunded obligations for social security and Medicare make Illinois’ predicament look like a skipped car payment.
In the meantime — and it looks like it’s going to be a long meantime — Puerto Rico is back in the 18th Century, minus the practical skills and simpler furnishings for living that way of life, and with a population many times beyond the carrying capacity of the island in that era. For instance, how many houses get their water from cisterns designed to catch rain runoff? How many communities across the island are walkable? (It looks like the gas stations will be down for quite a while.) I’ve been there and much of the island is as suburbanized as New Jersey — thanks to the desire to be up-to-date with the mainland, and the willingness of officials to make it look like that.
We’re only two days past the Hurricane Maria’s direct hit on Puerto Rico and there is no phone communication across the island, so we barely know what has happened. We’re weeks past Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and news of the consequences from those two events has strangely fallen out of the news media. Where have the people gone who lost everything? The news blackout is as complete and strange as the darkness that has descended on Puerto Rico.
In the Murk
Welcome to America’s first experiment in the World Made By Hand lifestyle. Where else is it going? Watch closely.
Ricardo Ramos, the director of the beleaguered, government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, told CNN Thursday that the island’s power infrastructure had been basically “destroyed” and will take months to come back
“Basically destroyed.” That’s about as basic as it gets civilization-wise.
Residents, Mr. Ramos said, would need to change the way they cook and cool off. For entertainment, old-school would be the best approach, he said. “It’s a good time for dads to buy a ball and a glove and change the way you entertain your children.”
Meaning, I guess, no more playing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard on-screen because you’ll be living it — though one wonders where will the money come from to buy the ball and glove? Few Puerto Ricans will be going to work with the power off. And the island’s public finances were in disarray sufficient to drive it into federal court last May to set in motion a legal receivership that amounted to bankruptcy in all but name. The commonwealth, a US territory, was in default for $74 billion in bonded debt, plus another $49 billion in unfunded pension obligations.
So, Puerto Rico already faced a crisis pre-Hurricane Maria, with its dodgy electric grid and crumbling infrastructure: roads, bridges, water and sewage systems. Bankruptcy put it in a poor position to issue new bonds for public works which are generally paid for with public borrowing. Who, exactly, would buy the new bonds? I hear readers whispering, “the Federal Reserve.” Which is a pretty good clue to understanding the circle-jerk that American finance has become.
Some sort of bailout is unavoidable, though President Trump tweeted “No Bailout for Puerto Rico” after the May bankruptcy proceeding. Things have changed and the shelf-life of Trumpian tweets is famously brief. But the crisis may actually strain the ability of the federal government to pretend it can cover the cost of every calamity that strikes the nation — at least not without casting doubt on the soundness of the dollar. And not a few bonafide states are also whirling around the bankruptcy drain: Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, Kentucky.
Constitutionally states are not permitted to declare bankruptcy, though counties and municipalities can. Congress would have to change the law to allow it. But states can default on their bonds and other obligations. Surely there would be some kind of fiscal and political hell to pay if they go that route. Nobody really knows what might happen in a state as big and complex as Illinois, which has been paying its way for decades by borrowing from the future. Suddenly, the future is here and nobody has a plan for it.
The case for the federal government is not so different. It, too, only manages to pay its bondholders via bookkeeping hocuspocus, and its colossal unfunded obligations for social security and Medicare make Illinois’ predicament look like a skipped car payment.
In the meantime — and it looks like it’s going to be a long meantime — Puerto Rico is back in the 18th Century, minus the practical skills and simpler furnishings for living that way of life, and with a population many times beyond the carrying capacity of the island in that era. For instance, how many houses get their water from cisterns designed to catch rain runoff? How many communities across the island are walkable? (It looks like the gas stations will be down for quite a while.) I’ve been there and much of the island is as suburbanized as New Jersey — thanks to the desire to be up-to-date with the mainland, and the willingness of officials to make it look like that.
We’re only two days past the Hurricane Maria’s direct hit on Puerto Rico and there is no phone communication across the island, so we barely know what has happened. We’re weeks past Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and news of the consequences from those two events has strangely fallen out of the news media. Where have the people gone who lost everything? The news blackout is as complete and strange as the darkness that has descended on Puerto Rico.
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
SC149-13
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47855.htm
Descent into Barbarism: Trump Makes Virtue Out of War And Genocide at The UN
It can’t get more outrageous. US President Donald Trump stood in front of the United Nations and openly threatened unilateral war and genocide. It’s a sign of the times that such criminal rhetoric is so casually spouted by the world’s biggest military state.
When American leaders address the UN General Assembly, people are generally used to hearing a litany of falsehoods about world events and narcissistic deceptions over America’s global role.
But when Trump made his debut speech on Tuesday, it marked, in addition to the usual American delusions, an unprecedented embrace of criminal militarism.
The nadir in his 40-minute rant came when Trump said the US would “totally destroy” North Korea – if it threatened America or its allies. The qualifier is a threadbare legal justification. It’s also just a cynical excuse for American aggression.
“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” said Trump. Mocking North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he added: “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”
Trump also called for forceful confrontation – regime change – against Iran, which he vilified as a “corrupt, murderous dictatorship.” He made similar veiled threats against Venezuela and its “socialist dictator” President Nicolas Maduro.
International war crimes lawyer Christopher Black said Trump’s speech amounted to a stunning self-indictment. The Canadian-based attorney said the American president’s words were a shockingly explicit repudiation of UN principles and international law on several counts.
With regard to North Korea, Black said: “The US president is threatening aggression under the false guise of ‘defense.' By openly stating the US will act alone to use military force is a violation of the United Nations’ Charter. Such unilateral use of military force is also a violation of the Nuremberg principles which condemned Nazi Germany for promulgating similar baseless justifications for its aggression.”
The lawyer also added that Trump’s warning to “totally destroy North Korea is advocating the genocide of an entire people.” Says Black: “Any military response to any attack has to be proportional – just enough to stop the attack. Trump’s stated objective to wipe the North Korean state and its people from the face of the earth is the crime of genocide under international law.”
It should be deeply troubling that the supposed leader of the world’s most powerful country so openly and disgustingly makes a virtue of barbarism. As American writer Tom Feeley succinctly described Trump’s diatribe at the UN: “An ignorant savage who spewed hatred all over the nations of the world.”
No wonder Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping opted to skip Trump’s landmark speech. So too did German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It’s amazing how anyone could sit through such torturous distortions. In a sane world, someone should have slapped handcuffs on Trump and hauled him off to a criminal court.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was also absent. While the North Korean ambassador walked out of the General Assembly chamber as Trump was taking the podium for his address.
When Trump declared his criminal intent toward North Korea there were audible gasps of disquiet among the hundreds of delegates. Several times during Trump’s tirade, the White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was seen covering his face with his hand or shifting uncomfortably in his seat. The body language spoke of shameful “embarrassment” – a word that Trump, ironically, used twice during his address referring disparagingly to others.
Anyone with a normal cognition of recent world events had to have cringed at almost every sentence uttered by Trump. It says something that the few delegates who appeared happy with Trump’s harping included Israel’s premier Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia – two actual rogue states that were unsurprisingly left out of Trump’s harangue.
Even the US media seemed embarrassed by the president’s boorish and bloodcurdling tone.
Pundits on CNN were staggered by Trump’s threats of annihilation toward North Korea. The New York Times called it “a bellicose debut” while the Washington Post said Trump’s “bellicosity and swagger” was “an incoherent mess.” Admittedly, those news outlets have been opposed to Trump’s presidency all the way since his election. But there was a different quality to their reaction to his UN speech - one of aghast disbelief that an American president could be so uncouth and unabashedly criminal in what he was advocating.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif blasted Trump for “ignorant hate speech” which, he said, was unworthy of a considered response.
Zarif is right. The torrent of falsehoods and delusions that Trump verbalized are hardly worth rebutting in detail, so crass were they in their upside-down view of the world. It’s so unhinged, it’s beyond argumentation and reason.
But let’s do a few illustrative choice quotes where irony is dead as a rock.
Trump said: “Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.”
That’s cloying, considering the recent reports of the American CIA allegedly funneling $2.2 billion worth of weapons to terrorist groups in Syria to overthrow the elected government of President Bashar Assad. And considering that Trump in front of 193 nations was threatening North Korea with “total destruction.”
Trump made a dig at Russia and China when he said: “We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea. We must uphold respect for law, respect for borders, and respect for culture, and the peaceful engagement these allow.”
Eh, this sanctimonious advice from the leader of a country that has subverted the sovereignty and borders of more nations than any other in history, including that of Ukraine where Washington violently installed a neo-Nazi regime in February 2014. American aerial bombing of numerous countries simultaneously, including Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, is a curious “respect for borders, sovereignty, and law.”
Trump talks about the “scourge of rogue regimes” without a hint of self-awareness about his own country’s depredations or of its Israeli and Saudi allies. He said: “The scourge of our planet today is a small group of rogue regimes that violate every principle on which the United Nations is based. They respect neither their own citizens nor the sovereign rights of their countries.”
Finally, perhaps the crowning absurdity was this: “The United States of America has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world, and the greatest defenders of sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all.”
Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama and other US presidents were also remarkable for their skill at spouting similar distortions and delusions. In that regard, Trump’s bravura nonsense was more of the same ridiculous “American exceptionalism.”
But setting Trump’s speech apart was his flagrant embrace of criminal militarism as a matter of US foreign policy, and his nauseating invocation of genocide in a war on North Korea.
Descent into Barbarism: Trump Makes Virtue Out of War And Genocide at The UN
It can’t get more outrageous. US President Donald Trump stood in front of the United Nations and openly threatened unilateral war and genocide. It’s a sign of the times that such criminal rhetoric is so casually spouted by the world’s biggest military state.
When American leaders address the UN General Assembly, people are generally used to hearing a litany of falsehoods about world events and narcissistic deceptions over America’s global role.
But when Trump made his debut speech on Tuesday, it marked, in addition to the usual American delusions, an unprecedented embrace of criminal militarism.
The nadir in his 40-minute rant came when Trump said the US would “totally destroy” North Korea – if it threatened America or its allies. The qualifier is a threadbare legal justification. It’s also just a cynical excuse for American aggression.
“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” said Trump. Mocking North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he added: “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”
Trump also called for forceful confrontation – regime change – against Iran, which he vilified as a “corrupt, murderous dictatorship.” He made similar veiled threats against Venezuela and its “socialist dictator” President Nicolas Maduro.
International war crimes lawyer Christopher Black said Trump’s speech amounted to a stunning self-indictment. The Canadian-based attorney said the American president’s words were a shockingly explicit repudiation of UN principles and international law on several counts.
With regard to North Korea, Black said: “The US president is threatening aggression under the false guise of ‘defense.' By openly stating the US will act alone to use military force is a violation of the United Nations’ Charter. Such unilateral use of military force is also a violation of the Nuremberg principles which condemned Nazi Germany for promulgating similar baseless justifications for its aggression.”
The lawyer also added that Trump’s warning to “totally destroy North Korea is advocating the genocide of an entire people.” Says Black: “Any military response to any attack has to be proportional – just enough to stop the attack. Trump’s stated objective to wipe the North Korean state and its people from the face of the earth is the crime of genocide under international law.”
It should be deeply troubling that the supposed leader of the world’s most powerful country so openly and disgustingly makes a virtue of barbarism. As American writer Tom Feeley succinctly described Trump’s diatribe at the UN: “An ignorant savage who spewed hatred all over the nations of the world.”
No wonder Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping opted to skip Trump’s landmark speech. So too did German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It’s amazing how anyone could sit through such torturous distortions. In a sane world, someone should have slapped handcuffs on Trump and hauled him off to a criminal court.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was also absent. While the North Korean ambassador walked out of the General Assembly chamber as Trump was taking the podium for his address.
When Trump declared his criminal intent toward North Korea there were audible gasps of disquiet among the hundreds of delegates. Several times during Trump’s tirade, the White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was seen covering his face with his hand or shifting uncomfortably in his seat. The body language spoke of shameful “embarrassment” – a word that Trump, ironically, used twice during his address referring disparagingly to others.
Anyone with a normal cognition of recent world events had to have cringed at almost every sentence uttered by Trump. It says something that the few delegates who appeared happy with Trump’s harping included Israel’s premier Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia – two actual rogue states that were unsurprisingly left out of Trump’s harangue.
Even the US media seemed embarrassed by the president’s boorish and bloodcurdling tone.
Pundits on CNN were staggered by Trump’s threats of annihilation toward North Korea. The New York Times called it “a bellicose debut” while the Washington Post said Trump’s “bellicosity and swagger” was “an incoherent mess.” Admittedly, those news outlets have been opposed to Trump’s presidency all the way since his election. But there was a different quality to their reaction to his UN speech - one of aghast disbelief that an American president could be so uncouth and unabashedly criminal in what he was advocating.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif blasted Trump for “ignorant hate speech” which, he said, was unworthy of a considered response.
Zarif is right. The torrent of falsehoods and delusions that Trump verbalized are hardly worth rebutting in detail, so crass were they in their upside-down view of the world. It’s so unhinged, it’s beyond argumentation and reason.
But let’s do a few illustrative choice quotes where irony is dead as a rock.
Trump said: “Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.”
That’s cloying, considering the recent reports of the American CIA allegedly funneling $2.2 billion worth of weapons to terrorist groups in Syria to overthrow the elected government of President Bashar Assad. And considering that Trump in front of 193 nations was threatening North Korea with “total destruction.”
Trump made a dig at Russia and China when he said: “We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea. We must uphold respect for law, respect for borders, and respect for culture, and the peaceful engagement these allow.”
Eh, this sanctimonious advice from the leader of a country that has subverted the sovereignty and borders of more nations than any other in history, including that of Ukraine where Washington violently installed a neo-Nazi regime in February 2014. American aerial bombing of numerous countries simultaneously, including Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, is a curious “respect for borders, sovereignty, and law.”
Trump talks about the “scourge of rogue regimes” without a hint of self-awareness about his own country’s depredations or of its Israeli and Saudi allies. He said: “The scourge of our planet today is a small group of rogue regimes that violate every principle on which the United Nations is based. They respect neither their own citizens nor the sovereign rights of their countries.”
Finally, perhaps the crowning absurdity was this: “The United States of America has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world, and the greatest defenders of sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all.”
Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama and other US presidents were also remarkable for their skill at spouting similar distortions and delusions. In that regard, Trump’s bravura nonsense was more of the same ridiculous “American exceptionalism.”
But setting Trump’s speech apart was his flagrant embrace of criminal militarism as a matter of US foreign policy, and his nauseating invocation of genocide in a war on North Korea.
SC149-12
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Trump_Falls_in_Line_with_Interventionism/60911/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Trump Falls in Line with Interventionism
In discussing President Trump, there is always the soft prejudice of low expectations – people praise him for reading from a Teleprompter even if his words make little sense – but there is no getting around the reality that his maiden address to the United Nations General Assembly must rank as one of the most embarrassing moments in America’s relations with the global community.
Trump offered a crude patchwork of propaganda and bluster, partly delivered as a campaign speech praising his own leadership – boasting about the relatively strong U.S. economy that he mostly inherited from President Obama – and partly reflecting his continued subservience to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
However, perhaps most importantly, Trump’s speech may have extinguished any flickering hope that his presidency might achieve some valuable course corrections in how the United States deals with the world, i.e., shifting away from the disastrous war/interventionist policies of his two predecessors.
Before the speech, there was at least some thinking that his visceral disdain for the neoconservatives, who mostly opposed his nomination and election, might lead him to a realization that their policies toward Iran, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere were at the core of America’s repeated and costly failures in recent decades.
Instead, apparently after a bracing lecture from Netanyahu on Monday, Trump bared himself in a kind of neocon Full Monte:
–He repeated the Israeli/neocon tripe about Iran destabilizing the Middle East when Shiite-ruled Iran actually has helped stabilize Iraq and Syria against Sunni terrorist groups and other militants supported by Saudi Arabia and – to a degree – Israel;
–He again denounced the Iranian nuclear agreement whose main flaw in the eyes of the Israelis and the neocons is that it disrupted their plans to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran, and he called for “regime change” in Iran, a long beloved dream of the Israelis and the neocons;
–He repeated the Israeli/neocon propaganda about Hezbollah as a terrorist organization when Hezbollah’s real crime was driving the Israeli military out of southern Lebanon in 2000, ending an Israeli occupation that began with Israel’s 1982 invasion;
–He praised his rush-to-judgment decision to bomb Syria last April, in line with Israeli/neocon propaganda against President Bashar al-Assad and partly out of a desire to please the same Washington establishment that is still scheming how to impeach him;
–He spoke with the crass hypocrisy that the neocons and many Israeli leaders have perfected, particularly his demand that “all nations … respect … the rights of every other sovereign nation” — when he made clear that he, like his White House predecessors, is ready to violate the sovereignty of other nations that get in Official Washington’s way.
A Litany of Wars
Just this century, the United States has invaded multiple nations without U.N. authorization, based on various “coalitions of the willing” and other subterfuges for wars of aggression, which the Nuremberg Tribunals deemed the “supreme international crime” and which the U.N. was specifically created to prevent.
Not only did President George W. Bush invade both Afghanistan and Iraq – while also sponsoring “anti-terror” operations in many other countries – but President Barack Obama acknowledged ordering military attacks in seven countries, including against the will of sovereign states, such as Libya and Syria. Obama also supported a violent coup against the elected government of Ukraine.
For his part, Trump already has shown disdain for international law by authorizing military strikes inside Yemen and Syria. In other words, if not for the fear of provoking American anger, many of the world’s diplomats might have responded with a barrage of catcalls toward Trump for his blatant hypocrisy. Without doubt, the United States is the preeminent violator of sovereignty and international law in the world today, yet Trump wagged his finger at others, including Russia (over Ukraine) and China (over the South China Sea).
He declared: “We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea. We must uphold respect for law, respect for borders, and respect for culture, and the peaceful engagement these allow.”
Then, with a seeming blindness to how much of the world sees the United States as a law onto itself, Trump added: “The scourge of our planet today is a small group of rogue regimes that violate every principle on which the United Nations is based.”
Of course, in the U.S. mainstream media’s commentary that followed, Trump’s hypocrisy went undetected. That’s because across the American political/media establishment, the U.S. right to act violently around the world is simply accepted as the way things are supposed to be. International law is for the other guy; not for the “indispensible nation,” not for the “sole remaining superpower.”
On Bibi’s Leash
Despite some of his “America First” rhetoric – tossed in as red meat to his “base” – Trump revealed a global outlook that differed from the Bush-Obama neoconservative/liberal-interventionist approach in words only. In substance, Trump appears to be just the latest American poodle on Bibi Netanyahu’s leash.
For instance, Trump bragged about attacking Syria over a dubious chemical-weapons claim while ignoring the role of the Saudi/Israeli tandem in assisting Al Qaeda and its Syrian affiliate; Trump threatened the international nuclear agreement with Iran while calling for regime change in Tehran, two of Netanyahu’s top priorities; and Trump warned that he would “totally destroy North Korea” over its nuclear and missile programs while making no mention of Israel’s rogue nuclear arsenal and sophisticated delivery capabilities.
Ignoring Saudi Arabia’s ties to terrorism, Trump touted his ludicrous summit in Riyadh in which he danced with swords and let King Salman and other corrupt Persian Gulf monarchs, who have long winked and nodded at ideological and logistical support going to Al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups, pretend their governments were joining an anti-terror coalition.
Exploding the myth that he is at least a street-smart operator who can’t be easily conned, Trump added, “In Saudi Arabia early last year, I was greatly honored to address the leaders of more than 50 Arab and Muslim nations. We agreed that all responsible nations must work together to confront terrorists and the Islamist extremism that inspires them.”
No wonder Netanyahu seemed so pleased with Trump’s speech. The Israeli prime minister could have written it himself while allowing Trump to add a few crude flourishes, like calling North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man … on a suicide mission”; referring to “the loser terrorists”; and declaring that many parts of the world are “going to hell.”
Trump also tossed in a plug for his “new strategy for victory” in Afghanistan and threw in some interventionist talk regarding the Western Hemisphere with more threats to Cuba and Venezuela about escalating sanctions and other activities to achieve more “regime change” solutions.
So, what Trump made clear in his U.N. address is that his “America First” and “pro-sovereignty” rhetoric is simply cover for a set of policies that are indistinguishable from those pushed by the neocons of the Bush administration or the liberal interventionists of the Obama administration. The rationalizations may change but the endless wars and “regime change” machinations continue.
Trump Falls in Line with Interventionism
In discussing President Trump, there is always the soft prejudice of low expectations – people praise him for reading from a Teleprompter even if his words make little sense – but there is no getting around the reality that his maiden address to the United Nations General Assembly must rank as one of the most embarrassing moments in America’s relations with the global community.
Trump offered a crude patchwork of propaganda and bluster, partly delivered as a campaign speech praising his own leadership – boasting about the relatively strong U.S. economy that he mostly inherited from President Obama – and partly reflecting his continued subservience to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
However, perhaps most importantly, Trump’s speech may have extinguished any flickering hope that his presidency might achieve some valuable course corrections in how the United States deals with the world, i.e., shifting away from the disastrous war/interventionist policies of his two predecessors.
Before the speech, there was at least some thinking that his visceral disdain for the neoconservatives, who mostly opposed his nomination and election, might lead him to a realization that their policies toward Iran, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere were at the core of America’s repeated and costly failures in recent decades.
Instead, apparently after a bracing lecture from Netanyahu on Monday, Trump bared himself in a kind of neocon Full Monte:
–He repeated the Israeli/neocon tripe about Iran destabilizing the Middle East when Shiite-ruled Iran actually has helped stabilize Iraq and Syria against Sunni terrorist groups and other militants supported by Saudi Arabia and – to a degree – Israel;
–He again denounced the Iranian nuclear agreement whose main flaw in the eyes of the Israelis and the neocons is that it disrupted their plans to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran, and he called for “regime change” in Iran, a long beloved dream of the Israelis and the neocons;
–He repeated the Israeli/neocon propaganda about Hezbollah as a terrorist organization when Hezbollah’s real crime was driving the Israeli military out of southern Lebanon in 2000, ending an Israeli occupation that began with Israel’s 1982 invasion;
–He praised his rush-to-judgment decision to bomb Syria last April, in line with Israeli/neocon propaganda against President Bashar al-Assad and partly out of a desire to please the same Washington establishment that is still scheming how to impeach him;
–He spoke with the crass hypocrisy that the neocons and many Israeli leaders have perfected, particularly his demand that “all nations … respect … the rights of every other sovereign nation” — when he made clear that he, like his White House predecessors, is ready to violate the sovereignty of other nations that get in Official Washington’s way.
A Litany of Wars
Just this century, the United States has invaded multiple nations without U.N. authorization, based on various “coalitions of the willing” and other subterfuges for wars of aggression, which the Nuremberg Tribunals deemed the “supreme international crime” and which the U.N. was specifically created to prevent.
Not only did President George W. Bush invade both Afghanistan and Iraq – while also sponsoring “anti-terror” operations in many other countries – but President Barack Obama acknowledged ordering military attacks in seven countries, including against the will of sovereign states, such as Libya and Syria. Obama also supported a violent coup against the elected government of Ukraine.
For his part, Trump already has shown disdain for international law by authorizing military strikes inside Yemen and Syria. In other words, if not for the fear of provoking American anger, many of the world’s diplomats might have responded with a barrage of catcalls toward Trump for his blatant hypocrisy. Without doubt, the United States is the preeminent violator of sovereignty and international law in the world today, yet Trump wagged his finger at others, including Russia (over Ukraine) and China (over the South China Sea).
He declared: “We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea. We must uphold respect for law, respect for borders, and respect for culture, and the peaceful engagement these allow.”
Then, with a seeming blindness to how much of the world sees the United States as a law onto itself, Trump added: “The scourge of our planet today is a small group of rogue regimes that violate every principle on which the United Nations is based.”
Of course, in the U.S. mainstream media’s commentary that followed, Trump’s hypocrisy went undetected. That’s because across the American political/media establishment, the U.S. right to act violently around the world is simply accepted as the way things are supposed to be. International law is for the other guy; not for the “indispensible nation,” not for the “sole remaining superpower.”
On Bibi’s Leash
Despite some of his “America First” rhetoric – tossed in as red meat to his “base” – Trump revealed a global outlook that differed from the Bush-Obama neoconservative/liberal-interventionist approach in words only. In substance, Trump appears to be just the latest American poodle on Bibi Netanyahu’s leash.
For instance, Trump bragged about attacking Syria over a dubious chemical-weapons claim while ignoring the role of the Saudi/Israeli tandem in assisting Al Qaeda and its Syrian affiliate; Trump threatened the international nuclear agreement with Iran while calling for regime change in Tehran, two of Netanyahu’s top priorities; and Trump warned that he would “totally destroy North Korea” over its nuclear and missile programs while making no mention of Israel’s rogue nuclear arsenal and sophisticated delivery capabilities.
Ignoring Saudi Arabia’s ties to terrorism, Trump touted his ludicrous summit in Riyadh in which he danced with swords and let King Salman and other corrupt Persian Gulf monarchs, who have long winked and nodded at ideological and logistical support going to Al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups, pretend their governments were joining an anti-terror coalition.
Exploding the myth that he is at least a street-smart operator who can’t be easily conned, Trump added, “In Saudi Arabia early last year, I was greatly honored to address the leaders of more than 50 Arab and Muslim nations. We agreed that all responsible nations must work together to confront terrorists and the Islamist extremism that inspires them.”
No wonder Netanyahu seemed so pleased with Trump’s speech. The Israeli prime minister could have written it himself while allowing Trump to add a few crude flourishes, like calling North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man … on a suicide mission”; referring to “the loser terrorists”; and declaring that many parts of the world are “going to hell.”
Trump also tossed in a plug for his “new strategy for victory” in Afghanistan and threw in some interventionist talk regarding the Western Hemisphere with more threats to Cuba and Venezuela about escalating sanctions and other activities to achieve more “regime change” solutions.
So, what Trump made clear in his U.N. address is that his “America First” and “pro-sovereignty” rhetoric is simply cover for a set of policies that are indistinguishable from those pushed by the neocons of the Bush administration or the liberal interventionists of the Obama administration. The rationalizations may change but the endless wars and “regime change” machinations continue.
SC149-11
http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
Financialization and The Destruction of the Real Economy
Financialization is destroying the real economy, but few in power seem to notice or care. The reason why is painfully obvious: those in power are reaping vast fortunes from the engines of financialization--for example, former President Obama: Obama Goes From White House to Wall Street in Less Than One Year.
This is not to single out President Obama as a special case; politicos across the spectrum depend on the engines of financialization to fund their campaigns and make them multi-millionaires, and corporate managers and financiers have skimmed billions of dollars in gains not from producing new, better and more affordable goods and services but by playing financialization games such as borrowing billions to buy back stocks, leveraged buyouts, and so on--all of which have reaped the insiders gargantuan fortunes while hollowing out the real economy.
Financialization necessarily hollows out the real economy, as Gordon Long and I detail in this new video program: The Results of Financialization - Part I (34 minutes)
The key dynamic is that financialization creates irresistible incentives to ramp up debt and leverage at the expense of the real economy. Those who fail to exploit financialization will underperform the market and be fired.
As Gordon explains, if a CEO refuses to load a company up with debt, a private-equity financier with access to cheap Federal Reserve credit will scoop up the company in a private buyout, fire the management, extract immense profits by loading the company with debt, then take the hollowed-out shell public again, reaping another windfall of financialized gains.
Note that the private-equity financiers have every incentive to lay off employees, especially experienced workers who earn higher salaries, to reduce costs before they take the hollowed-out shell public.
How can corporations pay out more to shareholders than they actually earned? Easy--financialization.
Another key dynamic in financialization is limitless liquidity and super low interest rates set by central banks--rates that are so low and liquidity so abundant that corporations can roll over their debt and actually add more debt and keep their interest payments unchanged.
This dynamic inevitably leads to zombie corporations--corporations with low rates of growth and profitability and high debt loads that in an unfinancialized economy would be recognized as insolvent and liquidated.
As we explain, financialization skews the risk-reward in favor of financial games, so real-world investments no longer make sense. Why risk building a factory in the U.S. or training workers when the pay-off is uncertain, when there are so many ways to reap immense fortunes via financial games that are ultimately backstopped by the Federal Reserve or federal agencies (i.e. the taxpayers)?
As many observers have noted, these perverse incentives have siphoned human talent away from productive employment and into enormously well-compensated but parasitic, exploitive financialization-related jobs.
Strip an economy of capital, productive incentives, talent and yes, ethics, and what are we left with? An economy spiraling toward an inevitable collapse. The metaphor I've used to explain this in the past is the Yellowstone forest fire. The deadwood of bad debt, extreme leverage, zombie companies and all the other fallen branches of financialization pile up, but the central banks no longer allow any creative destruction of unpayable debt and mis-allocated capital; every brush fire is instantly suppressed with more stimulus, more liquidity and lower interest rates.
As a result, the deadwood sapping the real economy of productivity and innovation is allowed to pile higher.
The only possible output of this suppression is an economy piled high with explosive risk. Eventually Nature supplies a lightning strike, and the resulting conflagration consumes the entire economy.
Financialization and The Destruction of the Real Economy
Financialization is destroying the real economy, but few in power seem to notice or care. The reason why is painfully obvious: those in power are reaping vast fortunes from the engines of financialization--for example, former President Obama: Obama Goes From White House to Wall Street in Less Than One Year.
This is not to single out President Obama as a special case; politicos across the spectrum depend on the engines of financialization to fund their campaigns and make them multi-millionaires, and corporate managers and financiers have skimmed billions of dollars in gains not from producing new, better and more affordable goods and services but by playing financialization games such as borrowing billions to buy back stocks, leveraged buyouts, and so on--all of which have reaped the insiders gargantuan fortunes while hollowing out the real economy.
Financialization necessarily hollows out the real economy, as Gordon Long and I detail in this new video program: The Results of Financialization - Part I (34 minutes)
The key dynamic is that financialization creates irresistible incentives to ramp up debt and leverage at the expense of the real economy. Those who fail to exploit financialization will underperform the market and be fired.
As Gordon explains, if a CEO refuses to load a company up with debt, a private-equity financier with access to cheap Federal Reserve credit will scoop up the company in a private buyout, fire the management, extract immense profits by loading the company with debt, then take the hollowed-out shell public again, reaping another windfall of financialized gains.
Note that the private-equity financiers have every incentive to lay off employees, especially experienced workers who earn higher salaries, to reduce costs before they take the hollowed-out shell public.
How can corporations pay out more to shareholders than they actually earned? Easy--financialization.
Another key dynamic in financialization is limitless liquidity and super low interest rates set by central banks--rates that are so low and liquidity so abundant that corporations can roll over their debt and actually add more debt and keep their interest payments unchanged.
This dynamic inevitably leads to zombie corporations--corporations with low rates of growth and profitability and high debt loads that in an unfinancialized economy would be recognized as insolvent and liquidated.
As we explain, financialization skews the risk-reward in favor of financial games, so real-world investments no longer make sense. Why risk building a factory in the U.S. or training workers when the pay-off is uncertain, when there are so many ways to reap immense fortunes via financial games that are ultimately backstopped by the Federal Reserve or federal agencies (i.e. the taxpayers)?
As many observers have noted, these perverse incentives have siphoned human talent away from productive employment and into enormously well-compensated but parasitic, exploitive financialization-related jobs.
Strip an economy of capital, productive incentives, talent and yes, ethics, and what are we left with? An economy spiraling toward an inevitable collapse. The metaphor I've used to explain this in the past is the Yellowstone forest fire. The deadwood of bad debt, extreme leverage, zombie companies and all the other fallen branches of financialization pile up, but the central banks no longer allow any creative destruction of unpayable debt and mis-allocated capital; every brush fire is instantly suppressed with more stimulus, more liquidity and lower interest rates.
As a result, the deadwood sapping the real economy of productivity and innovation is allowed to pile higher.
The only possible output of this suppression is an economy piled high with explosive risk. Eventually Nature supplies a lightning strike, and the resulting conflagration consumes the entire economy.
SC149-10
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47834.htm
How The Military Defeated Trump's Insurgency
Trump was seen as a presidential candidate who would possibly move towards a less interventionist foreign policy. That hope is gone. The insurgency that brought Trump to the top was defeated by a counter-insurgency campaign waged by the U.S. military. (Historically its first successful one). The military has taken control of the White House process and it is now taking control of its policies.
It is schooling Trump on globalism and its "indispensable" role in it. Trump was insufficiently supportive of their desires and thus had to undergo reeducation:
When briefed on the diplomatic, military and intelligence posts, the new president would often cast doubt on the need for all the resources. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson organized the July 20 session to lay out the case for maintaining far-flung outposts — and to present it, using charts and maps, in a way the businessman-turned-politician would appreciate.
Trump was hauled into a Pentagon basement 'tank' and indoctrinated by the glittering four-star generals he admired since he was a kid:
The session was, in effect, American Power 101 and the student was the man working the levers. It was part of the ongoing education of a president who arrived at the White House with no experience in the military or government and brought with him advisers deeply skeptical of what they labeled the “globalist” worldview. In coordinated efforts and quiet conversations, some of Trump’s aides have worked for months to counter that view, hoping the president can be persuaded to maintain — if not expand — the American footprint and influence abroad.
Trump was sold the establishment policies he originally despised. No alternative view was presented to him.
It is indisputable that the generals are now ruling in Washington DC. They came to power over decades by shaping culture through their sponsorship of Hollywood, by manipulating the media through "embedded" reporting and by forming and maintaining the countries infrastructure through the Army Corps of Engineers. The military, through the NSA as well as through its purchasing power, controls the information flow on the internet. Until recently the military establishment only ruled from behind the scene. The other parts of the power triangle, the corporation executives and the political establishment, were more visible and significant. But during the 2016 election the military bet on Trump and is now, after he unexpectedly won, collecting its price.
Trump's success as the "Not-Hillary" candidate was based on an anti-establishment insurgency. Representatives of that insurgency, Flynn, Bannon and the MAGA voters, drove him through his first months in office. An intense media campaign was launched to counter them and the military took control of the White House. The anti-establishment insurgents were fired. Trump is now reduced to public figure head of a stratocracy - a military junta which nominally follows the rule of law.
Stephen Kinzer describes this as America’s slow-motion military coup:
Ultimate power to shape American foreign and security policy has fallen into the hands of three military men [...]
...
Being ruled by generals seems preferable to the alternative. It isn’t.
...
[It] leads toward a distorted set of national priorities, with military “needs” always rated more important than domestic ones.
...
It is no great surprise that Trump has been drawn into the foreign policy mainstream; the same happened to President Obama early in his presidency. More ominous is that Trump has turned much of his power over to generals. Worst of all, many Americans find this reassuring. They are so disgusted by the corruption and shortsightedness of our political class that they turn to soldiers as an alternative. It is a dangerous temptation.
The country has fallen to that temptation even on social-economic issues:
In the wake of the deadly racial violence in Charlottesville this month, five of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were hailed as moral authorities for condemning hate in less equivocal terms than the commander in chief did.
...
On social policy, military leaders have been voices for moderation.
The junta is bigger than its three well known leaders:
Kelly, Mattis and McMaster are not the only military figures serving at high levels in the Trump administration. CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke each served in various branches of the military, and Trump recently tapped former Army general Mark S. Inch to lead the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
...
the National Security Council [..] counts two other generals on the senior staff.
This is no longer a Coup Waiting to Happen The coup has happened with few noticing it and ever fewer concerned about it. Everything of importance now passes through the Junta's hands:
[Chief of staff John] Kelly initiated a new policymaking process in which just he and one other aide [...] will review all documents that cross the Resolute desk.
...
The new system [..] is designed to ensure that the president won’t see any external policy documents, internal policy memos, agency reports and even news articles that haven’t been vetted.
To control Trump the junta filters his information input and eliminates any potentially alternative view:
Staff who oppose [policy xyz] no longer have unfettered access to Trump, and nor do allies on the outside [.. .] Kelly now has real control over the most important input: the flow of human and paper advice into the Oval Office. For a man as obsessed about his self image as Trump, a new flow of inputs can make the world of difference.
The Trump insurgency against the establishment was marked by a mostly informal information and decision process. That has been destroyed and replaced:
Worried that Trump would end existing US spending/policies (largely, still geared to cold war priorities), the senior military staff running the Trump administration launched a counter-insurgency against the insurgency.
...
General Kelly, Trump's Chief of Staff, has put Trump on a establishment-only media diet.
...
In short, by controlling Trump's information flow with social media/networks, the generals smashed the insurgency's OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). Deprived of this connection, Trump is now weathervaning to cater to the needs of the establishment ...
The Junta members dictate their policies to Trump by only proposing to him certain alternatives. The one that is most preferable to them will be presented as the only desirable one. "There are no alternatives," Trump will be told again and again.
Thus we get a continuation of a failed Afghanistan policy and will soon get a militarily aggressive policy towards Iran.
Other countries noticed how the game has changed. The real decisions are made by the generals, Trump is ignored as a mere figurehead:
Asked whether he was predicting war [with North Korea], [former defence minister of Japan, Satoshi] Morimoto said: "I think Washington has not decided ... The final decision-maker is [US Defence Secretary] Mr Mattis ... Not the president."
Climate change, its local catastrophes and the infrastructure problems it creates within the U.S. will further extend the military role in shaping domestic U.S. policy.
Nationalistic indoctrination, already at abnormal heights in the U.S. society, will further increase. Military control will creep into ever extending fields of once staunchly civilian areas of policy. (Witness the increasing militarization of the police.)
It is only way to sustain the empire.
It is doubtful that Trump will be able to resist the policies imposed on him. Any flicker of resistance will be smashed. The outside insurgency which enabled his election is left without a figurehead, It will likely disperse. The system won
How The Military Defeated Trump's Insurgency
Trump was seen as a presidential candidate who would possibly move towards a less interventionist foreign policy. That hope is gone. The insurgency that brought Trump to the top was defeated by a counter-insurgency campaign waged by the U.S. military. (Historically its first successful one). The military has taken control of the White House process and it is now taking control of its policies.
It is schooling Trump on globalism and its "indispensable" role in it. Trump was insufficiently supportive of their desires and thus had to undergo reeducation:
When briefed on the diplomatic, military and intelligence posts, the new president would often cast doubt on the need for all the resources. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson organized the July 20 session to lay out the case for maintaining far-flung outposts — and to present it, using charts and maps, in a way the businessman-turned-politician would appreciate.
Trump was hauled into a Pentagon basement 'tank' and indoctrinated by the glittering four-star generals he admired since he was a kid:
The session was, in effect, American Power 101 and the student was the man working the levers. It was part of the ongoing education of a president who arrived at the White House with no experience in the military or government and brought with him advisers deeply skeptical of what they labeled the “globalist” worldview. In coordinated efforts and quiet conversations, some of Trump’s aides have worked for months to counter that view, hoping the president can be persuaded to maintain — if not expand — the American footprint and influence abroad.
Trump was sold the establishment policies he originally despised. No alternative view was presented to him.
It is indisputable that the generals are now ruling in Washington DC. They came to power over decades by shaping culture through their sponsorship of Hollywood, by manipulating the media through "embedded" reporting and by forming and maintaining the countries infrastructure through the Army Corps of Engineers. The military, through the NSA as well as through its purchasing power, controls the information flow on the internet. Until recently the military establishment only ruled from behind the scene. The other parts of the power triangle, the corporation executives and the political establishment, were more visible and significant. But during the 2016 election the military bet on Trump and is now, after he unexpectedly won, collecting its price.
Trump's success as the "Not-Hillary" candidate was based on an anti-establishment insurgency. Representatives of that insurgency, Flynn, Bannon and the MAGA voters, drove him through his first months in office. An intense media campaign was launched to counter them and the military took control of the White House. The anti-establishment insurgents were fired. Trump is now reduced to public figure head of a stratocracy - a military junta which nominally follows the rule of law.
Stephen Kinzer describes this as America’s slow-motion military coup:
Ultimate power to shape American foreign and security policy has fallen into the hands of three military men [...]
...
Being ruled by generals seems preferable to the alternative. It isn’t.
...
[It] leads toward a distorted set of national priorities, with military “needs” always rated more important than domestic ones.
...
It is no great surprise that Trump has been drawn into the foreign policy mainstream; the same happened to President Obama early in his presidency. More ominous is that Trump has turned much of his power over to generals. Worst of all, many Americans find this reassuring. They are so disgusted by the corruption and shortsightedness of our political class that they turn to soldiers as an alternative. It is a dangerous temptation.
The country has fallen to that temptation even on social-economic issues:
In the wake of the deadly racial violence in Charlottesville this month, five of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were hailed as moral authorities for condemning hate in less equivocal terms than the commander in chief did.
...
On social policy, military leaders have been voices for moderation.
The junta is bigger than its three well known leaders:
Kelly, Mattis and McMaster are not the only military figures serving at high levels in the Trump administration. CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke each served in various branches of the military, and Trump recently tapped former Army general Mark S. Inch to lead the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
...
the National Security Council [..] counts two other generals on the senior staff.
This is no longer a Coup Waiting to Happen The coup has happened with few noticing it and ever fewer concerned about it. Everything of importance now passes through the Junta's hands:
[Chief of staff John] Kelly initiated a new policymaking process in which just he and one other aide [...] will review all documents that cross the Resolute desk.
...
The new system [..] is designed to ensure that the president won’t see any external policy documents, internal policy memos, agency reports and even news articles that haven’t been vetted.
To control Trump the junta filters his information input and eliminates any potentially alternative view:
Staff who oppose [policy xyz] no longer have unfettered access to Trump, and nor do allies on the outside [.. .] Kelly now has real control over the most important input: the flow of human and paper advice into the Oval Office. For a man as obsessed about his self image as Trump, a new flow of inputs can make the world of difference.
The Trump insurgency against the establishment was marked by a mostly informal information and decision process. That has been destroyed and replaced:
Worried that Trump would end existing US spending/policies (largely, still geared to cold war priorities), the senior military staff running the Trump administration launched a counter-insurgency against the insurgency.
...
General Kelly, Trump's Chief of Staff, has put Trump on a establishment-only media diet.
...
In short, by controlling Trump's information flow with social media/networks, the generals smashed the insurgency's OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). Deprived of this connection, Trump is now weathervaning to cater to the needs of the establishment ...
The Junta members dictate their policies to Trump by only proposing to him certain alternatives. The one that is most preferable to them will be presented as the only desirable one. "There are no alternatives," Trump will be told again and again.
Thus we get a continuation of a failed Afghanistan policy and will soon get a militarily aggressive policy towards Iran.
Other countries noticed how the game has changed. The real decisions are made by the generals, Trump is ignored as a mere figurehead:
Asked whether he was predicting war [with North Korea], [former defence minister of Japan, Satoshi] Morimoto said: "I think Washington has not decided ... The final decision-maker is [US Defence Secretary] Mr Mattis ... Not the president."
Climate change, its local catastrophes and the infrastructure problems it creates within the U.S. will further extend the military role in shaping domestic U.S. policy.
Nationalistic indoctrination, already at abnormal heights in the U.S. society, will further increase. Military control will creep into ever extending fields of once staunchly civilian areas of policy. (Witness the increasing militarization of the police.)
It is only way to sustain the empire.
It is doubtful that Trump will be able to resist the policies imposed on him. Any flicker of resistance will be smashed. The outside insurgency which enabled his election is left without a figurehead, It will likely disperse. The system won
Monday, September 18, 2017
SC149-9
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Freedom_Is_a_Myth%3A_We_Are_All_Prisoners_of_the_Police_State%E2%80%99s_Panopticon_Village/60878/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Freedom Is a Myth: We Are All Prisoners of the Police State’s Panopticon Village
“We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche…. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy… We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other people’s Villages, but we are all prisoners.”— Patrick McGoohan
First broadcast in Great Britain 50 years ago, The Prisoner—a dystopian television series described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of humankind to meekly accept their lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of their own making.
Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly tranquil retirement community known only as the Village. The Village is an idyllic setting with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.
While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.
The series’ protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan, is Number Six.
Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.
“I am not a number. I am a free man,” was the mantra chanted on each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by McGoohan.
In the opening episode (“The Arrival”), Number Six meets Number Two, who explains to him that he is in The Village because information stored “inside” his head has made him too valuable to be allowed to roam free “outside.”
Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.
Number Six refuses to comply.
In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”
Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.
Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s getaways are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.” Still, he refuses to give up. “Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”
Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.
As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”
The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy.
As Thill noted when McGoohan died in 2009, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”
The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.
The American Police State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.
Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”
Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be and funding its existence.
Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the new mantra of the architects of the police state and their corporate collaborators (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Instagram, etc.).
Government eyes are watching you.
They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.
Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between obeying the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.
When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.
However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.
Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.
Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.
Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.
As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”
This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.
It is a prison from which there will be no escape if the government gets it way.
As Glenn Greenwald notes:
“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”
Even now, the Trump Administration is working to make some of the National Security Agency’s vast spying powers permanent.
In fact, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is pushing for Congress to permanently renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows government snoops to warrantlessly comb through and harvest vast quantities of our communications.
And just like that, we’re back in the Village, our escape plans foiled, our future bleak.
Except this is no surprise ending: for those who haven’t been taking the escapist blue pill, who haven’t fallen for the Deep State’s phony rhetoric, who haven’t been lured in by the promise of a political savior, we never stopped being prisoners.
So how do we break out?
For starters, wake up. Resist the urge to comply.
The struggle to remain “oneself in a society increasingly obsessed with conformity to mass consumerism,” writes Steven Paul Davies, means that superficiality and image trump truth and the individual. The result is the group mind and the tyranny of mob-think.
Think for yourself. Be an individual. As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”
In a media-dominated age in which the lines between entertainment, politics and news reporting are blurred, it is extremely difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. We are so bombarded with images, dictates, rules and punishments and stamped with numbers from the day we are born that it is a wonder we ever ponder a concept such as freedom. As McGoohan declared, “Freedom is a myth.”
In the end, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we are all prisoners of our own mind.
In fact, it is in the mind that prisons are created for us. And in the lockdown of political correctness, it becomes extremely difficult to speak or act individually without being ostracized. Thus, so often we are forced to retreat inwardly into our minds, a prison without bars from which we cannot escape, and into the world of video games and television and the Internet.
We have come full circle from Bentham’s Panopticon to McGoohan’s Village to Huxley’s Brave New World.
As cultural theorist Neil Postman observed:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared we would become a captive audience. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
You want to be free? Break out of the circle.
Freedom Is a Myth: We Are All Prisoners of the Police State’s Panopticon Village
“We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche…. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy… We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other people’s Villages, but we are all prisoners.”— Patrick McGoohan
First broadcast in Great Britain 50 years ago, The Prisoner—a dystopian television series described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of humankind to meekly accept their lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of their own making.
Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly tranquil retirement community known only as the Village. The Village is an idyllic setting with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.
While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.
The series’ protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan, is Number Six.
Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.
“I am not a number. I am a free man,” was the mantra chanted on each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by McGoohan.
In the opening episode (“The Arrival”), Number Six meets Number Two, who explains to him that he is in The Village because information stored “inside” his head has made him too valuable to be allowed to roam free “outside.”
Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.
Number Six refuses to comply.
In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”
Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.
Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s getaways are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.” Still, he refuses to give up. “Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”
Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.
As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”
The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy.
As Thill noted when McGoohan died in 2009, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”
The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.
The American Police State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.
Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”
Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be and funding its existence.
Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the new mantra of the architects of the police state and their corporate collaborators (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Instagram, etc.).
Government eyes are watching you.
They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.
Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between obeying the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.
When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.
However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.
Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.
Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.
Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.
As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”
This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.
It is a prison from which there will be no escape if the government gets it way.
As Glenn Greenwald notes:
“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”
Even now, the Trump Administration is working to make some of the National Security Agency’s vast spying powers permanent.
In fact, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is pushing for Congress to permanently renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows government snoops to warrantlessly comb through and harvest vast quantities of our communications.
And just like that, we’re back in the Village, our escape plans foiled, our future bleak.
Except this is no surprise ending: for those who haven’t been taking the escapist blue pill, who haven’t fallen for the Deep State’s phony rhetoric, who haven’t been lured in by the promise of a political savior, we never stopped being prisoners.
So how do we break out?
For starters, wake up. Resist the urge to comply.
The struggle to remain “oneself in a society increasingly obsessed with conformity to mass consumerism,” writes Steven Paul Davies, means that superficiality and image trump truth and the individual. The result is the group mind and the tyranny of mob-think.
Think for yourself. Be an individual. As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”
In a media-dominated age in which the lines between entertainment, politics and news reporting are blurred, it is extremely difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. We are so bombarded with images, dictates, rules and punishments and stamped with numbers from the day we are born that it is a wonder we ever ponder a concept such as freedom. As McGoohan declared, “Freedom is a myth.”
In the end, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we are all prisoners of our own mind.
In fact, it is in the mind that prisons are created for us. And in the lockdown of political correctness, it becomes extremely difficult to speak or act individually without being ostracized. Thus, so often we are forced to retreat inwardly into our minds, a prison without bars from which we cannot escape, and into the world of video games and television and the Internet.
We have come full circle from Bentham’s Panopticon to McGoohan’s Village to Huxley’s Brave New World.
As cultural theorist Neil Postman observed:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared we would become a captive audience. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
You want to be free? Break out of the circle.
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