http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48844.htm
U.S. Empire Still Incoherent After All These Years
I recently reread Michael Mann’s book, Incoherent Empire, which he wrote in 2003, soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Mann is a sociology professor at UCLA and the author of a four-volume series called The Sources of Social Power, in which he explained the major developments of world history as the interplay between four types of power: military, economic, political, and ideological.
In Incoherent Empire, Mann used the same framework to examine what he called the U.S.’s “new imperialism” after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He predicted that, “The American Empire will turn out to be a military giant; a back-seat economic driver; a political schizophrenic; and an ideological phantom.”
What struck me most forcefully as I reread Incoherent Empire was that absolutely nothing has changed in the “incoherence” of U.S. imperialism. If I picked up the book for the first time today and didn’t know it was written 15 years ago, I could read nearly all of it as a perceptive critique of American imperialism exactly as it exists today.
In the intervening 15 years, U.S. policy failures have resulted in ever-spreading violence and chaos that affect hundreds of millions of people in at least a dozen countries. The U.S. has utterly failed to bring any of its neo-imperial wars to a stable or peaceful end. And yet the U.S. imperial project sails on, seemingly blind to its consistently catastrophic results.
Instead, U.S. civilian and military leaders shamelessly blame their victims for the violence and chaos they have unleashed on them, and endlessly repackage the same old war propaganda to justify record military budgets and threaten new wars.
But they never hold themselves or each other accountable for their catastrophic failures or the carnage and human misery they inflict. So they have made no genuine effort to remedy any of the systemic problems, weaknesses and contradictions of U.S. imperialism that Michael Mann identified in 2003 or that other critical analysts like Noam Chomsky, Gabriel Kolko, William Blum and Richard Barnet have described for decades.
Let’s examine each of Mann’s four images of the foundations of the U.S.’s Incoherent Empire, and see how they relate to the continuing crisis of U.S. imperialism that he presciently foretold:
Military Giant
As Mann noted in 2003, imperial armed forces have to do four things: defend their own territory; strike offensively; conquer territories and people; then pacify and rule them.
Today’s U.S. military dwarfs any other country’s military forces. It has unprecedented firepower, which it can use from unprecedented distances to kill more people and wreak more destruction than any previous war machine in history, while minimizing U.S. casualties and thus the domestic political blowback for its violence.
But that’s where its power ends. When it comes to actually conquering and pacifying a foreign country, America’s technological way of war is worse than useless. The very power of U.S. weapons, the “Robocop” appearance of American troops, their lack of language skills and their isolation from other cultures make U.S. forces a grave danger to the populations they are charged with controlling and pacifying, never a force for law and order, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or North Korea.
John Pace, who headed the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq during the U.S. occupation compared U.S. efforts to pacify the country to “trying to swat a fly with a bomb.”
Burhan Fasa’a, an Iraqi reporter for Lebanon’s LBC TV network, survived the second U.S. assault on Fallujah in November 2004. He spent nine days in a house with a population that grew to 26 people as neighboring homes were damaged or destroyed and more and more people sought shelter with Fasa’a and his hosts.
Finally a squad of U.S. Marines burst in, yelling orders in English that most of the residents didn’t understand and shooting them if they didn’t respond. “Americans did not have interpreters with them, “ Fasa’a explained, “so they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English… Soldiers thought the people were rejecting their orders, so they shot them. But the people just couldn’t understand them.”
This is one personal account of one episode in a pattern of atrocities that grinds on, day in day out, in country after country, as it has done for the last 16 years. To the extent that the Western media cover these atrocities at all, the mainstream narrative is that they are a combination of unfortunate but isolated incidents and the “normal” horrors of war.
But that is not true. They are the direct result of the American way of war, which prioritizes “force protection” over the lives of human beings in other countries to minimize U.S. casualties and thus domestic political opposition to war. In practice, this means using overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower in ways that make it impossible to distinguish combatants from non-combatants or protect civilians from the horrors of war as the Geneva Conventions require.
U.S. rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan have included: systematic, theater-wide use of torture; orders to “dead-check” or kill wounded enemy combatants; orders to “kill all military-age males” during certain operations; and “weapons-free” zones that mirror Vietnam-era “free-fire” zones.
When lower ranks have been prosecuted for war crimes against civilians, they have been acquitted or given light sentences because they were acting on orders from senior officers. But courts martial have allowed the senior officers implicated in these cases to testify in secret or have not called them to testify at all, and none have been prosecuted.
After nearly a hundred deaths in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, including torture deaths that are capital crimes under U.S. federal law, the harshest sentence handed down was a 5 month prison sentence, and the most senior officer prosecuted was a major, although the orders to torture prisoners came from the very top of the chain of command. As Rear Admiral John Hutson, the retired Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Navy, wrote in Human Rights First’s Command’s Responsibility report after investigating just 12 of these deaths, “One such incident would be an isolated transgression; two would be a serious problem; a dozen of them is policy.”
So the Military Giant is not just a war machine. It is also a war crimes machine.
The logic of force protection and technological warfare also means that the roughly 800 U.S. military bases in other countries are surrounded by barbed wire and concrete blast-walls and staffed mainly by Americans, so that the 290,000 U.S. troops occupying 183 foreign countries have little contact with the local people their empire aspires to rule.
Donald Rumsfeld described this empire of self-contained bases as “lily pads,” from which his forces could hop like frogs from one base to another by plane, helicopter or armored vehicle, or launch strikes on the surrounding territory, without exposing themselves to the dangers of meeting the locals.
Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East reporter for the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, had another name for these bases: “crusader castles” – after the medieval fortresses built by equally isolated foreign invaders a thousand years ago that still dot the landscape of the Middle East.
Michael Mann contrasted the isolation of U.S. troops in their empire of bases to the lives of British officers in India, “where officers’ clubs were typically on the edge of the encampment, commanding the nicest location and view. The officers were relaxed about their personal safety, sipping their whisky and soda and gin and tonic in full view of the natives, (who) comprised most of the inhabitants – NCOs and soldiers, servants, stable-hands, drivers and sometimes their families.”
In 1945, a wiser generation of American leaders brought to their senses by the mass destruction of two world wars realized the imperial game was up. They worked hard to frame their new-found power and economic dominance within an international system that the rest of the world would accept as legitimate, with a central role for President Roosevelt’s vision of the United Nations.
Roosevelt promised that his “permanent structure of peace,” would, “spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the expedients that have been tried for centuries – and have always failed,” and that “the forces of aggression (would be) permanently outlawed.”
America’s World War II leaders were wisely on guard against the kind of militarism they had confronted and defeated in Germany and Japan. When an ugly militarism reared its head in the U.S. in the late 1940s, threatening a “preemptive” nuclear war to destroy the USSR before it could develop its own nuclear deterrent, General Eisenhower responded forcefully in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in St. Louis,
“I decry loose and sometimes gloating talk about the high degree of security implicit in a weapon that might destroy millions overnight,” Eisenhower declared. “Those who measure security solely in terms of offensive capacity distort its meaning and mislead those who pay them heed. No modern nation has ever equaled the crushing offensive power attained by the German war machine in 1939. No modern country was broken and smashed as was Germany six years later.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief US representative at the London Conference that drew up the Nuremberg Principles in 1945, stated as the official U.S. position, “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
That was the U.S. government of 1945 explicitly agreeing to the prosecution of Americans who commit aggression, which Jackson and the judges at Nuremberg defined as “the supreme international crime.” That would now include the last six U.S. presidents: Reagan (Grenada and Nicaragua), Bush I (Panama), Clinton (Yugoslavia), Bush II (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia), Obama (Pakistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen) and Trump (Syria and Yemen).
Since Mann wrote Incoherent Empire in 2003, the Military Giant has rampaged around the world waging wars that have killed millions of people and wrecked country after country. But its unaccountable campaign of serial aggression has failed to bring peace or security to any of the countries it has attacked or invaded. As even some members of the U.S. military now recognize, the mindless violence of the Military Giant serves no rational or constructive purpose, imperialist or otherwise.
Economic Back Seat Driver
In 2003, Michael Mann wrote that, “The U.S. productive engine remains formidable, the global financial system providing its fuel. But the U.S. is only a back-seat driver since it cannot directly control either foreign investors or foreign economies.”
Since 2003, the U.S. role in the global economy has declined further, now comprising only 22% of global economic activity, compared with 40% at the height of its economic dominance in the 1950s and 60s. China is displacing the U.S. as the largest trading partner of countries around the world, and its “new silk road” initiatives are building the infrastructure to cement and further expand its role as the global hub of manufacturing and commerce.
The U.S. can still wield its financial clout as an arsenal of carrots and sticks to pressure poorer, weaker countries do what it wants. But this is a far cry from the actions of an imperial power that actually rules far-flung territories and subjects on other continents. As Mann put it, “Even if they are in debt, the U.S. cannot force reform on them. In the global economy, it is only a back-seat driver, nagging the real driver, the sovereign state, sometimes administering sharp blows to his head.”
At the extreme, the U.S. uses economic sanctions as a brutal form of economic warfare that hurts and kills ordinary people, while generally inflicting less pain on the leaders who are their nominal target. U.S. leaders claim that the pain of economic sanctions is intended to force people to abandon and overthrow their leaders, a way to achieve regime change without the violence and horror of war. But Robert Pape of the University of Chicago conducted an extensive study of the effects of sanctions and concluded that only 5 out of 115 sanctions regimes have ever achieved that goal.
When sanctions inevitably fail, they can still be useful to U.S. officials as part of a political narrative to blame the victims and frame war as a last resort. But this is only a political ploy, not a legal pretext for war.
A secondary goal of all such imperial bullying is to make an example of the victims to put other weak countries on notice that resisting imperial demands can be dangerous. The obvious counter to such strategies is for poorer, weaker countries to band together to resist imperial bullying, as in collective groupings like CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and also in the UN General Assembly, where the U.S. often finds itself outvoted.
The dominant position of the U.S. and the dollar in the international financial system have given the U.S. a unique ability to finance its imperial wars and global military expansion without bankrupting itself in the process. As Mann described in Incoherent Empire,
“In principle, the world is free to withdraw its subsidies to the U.S., but unless the U.S. really alienates the world and over-stretches its economy, this is unlikely. For the moment, the U.S. can finance substantial imperial activity. It does so carefully, spending billions on its strategic allies, however unworthy and oppressive they may be.”
The economic clout of the U.S. back-seat driver was tested in 2003 when it deployed maximum pressure on other countries to support its invasion of Iraq. Chile, Mexico, Pakistan, Guinea, Angola and Cameroon were on the Security Council at the time but were all ready to vote against the use of force. It didn’t help the U.S. case that it had failed to deliver the “carrots” it promised to the countries who voted for war on Iraq in 1991, nor that the money it promised Pakistan for supporting its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was not paid until the U.S. wanted its support again in 2003 over Iraq.
Mann concluded, “An administration which is trying to cut taxes while waging war will not be able to hand out much cash around the world. This back-seat driver will not pay for the gas. It is difficult to build an Empire without spending money.”
Fifteen years later, remarkably, the wealthy investors of the world have continued to subsidize U.S. war-making by investing in record U.S. debt, and a deceptive global charm offensive by President Obama partially rebuilt U.S. alliances. But the U.S. failure to abandon its illegal policies of aggression and war crimes have only increased its isolation since 2003, especially from countries in the Global South. People all over the world now tell pollsters they view the U.S. as the greatest threat to peace in the world.
It is also possible that their U.S. debt holdings give China and other creditors (Germany?) some leverage by which they can ultimately discipline U.S. imperialism. In 1956, President Eisenhower reportedly threatened to call in the U.K.’s debts if it did not withdraw its forces from Egypt during the Suez crisis, and there has long been speculation that China could exercise similar economic leverage to stop U.S. aggression at some strategic moment.
It seems more likely that boom and bust financial bubbles, shifts in global trade and investment and international opposition to U.S. wars will more gradually erode U.S. financial hegemony along with other forms of power.
Michael Mann wrote in 2003 that the world was unlikely to “withdraw its subsidies” for U.S. imperialism “unless the U.S. really alienates the world and over-stretches its economy.” But that prospect seems more likely than ever in 2018 as President Trump seems doggedly determined to do both.
Political Schizophrenic
In its isolated fantasy world, the Political Schizophrenic is the greatest country in the world, the “shining city on a hill,” the land of opportunity where anyone can find their American dream. The rest of the world so desperately wants what we have that we have to build a wall to keep them out. Our armed forces are the greatest force for good that the world has ever known, valiantly fighting to give other people the chance to experience the democracy and freedom that we enjoy.
But if we seriously compare the U.S. to other wealthy countries, we find a completely different picture. The United States has the most extreme inequality, the most widespread poverty, the least social and economic mobility and the least effective social safety net of any technologically advanced country.
America is exceptional, not in the imaginary blessings our Political Schizophrenic politicians take credit for, but in its unique failure to provide healthcare, education and other necessities of life to large parts of its population, and in its systematic violations of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and other binding international treaties.
If the U.S. was really the democracy it claims to be, the American public could elect leaders who would fix all these problems. But the U.S. political system is so endemically corrupt that only a Political Schizophrenic could call it a democracy. Former President Jimmy Carter believes that the U.S. is now ”just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery.” U.S. voter turnout is understandably among the lowest in the developed world.
Sheldon Wolin, who taught political science at Berkeley and Princeton for 40 years, described the actually existing U.S. political system as “inverted totalitarianism.” Instead of abolishing democratic institutions on the “classical totalitarian” model, the U.S.’s inverted totalitarian system preserves the hollowed-out trappings of democracy to falsely legitimize the oligarchy and political bribery described by President Carter.
As Wolin explained, this has been more palatable and sustainable, and therefore more effective, than the classical form of totalitarianism as a means of concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a corrupt ruling class.
The corruption of the U.S. political system is increasingly obvious to Americans, but also to people in other countries. Billion-dollar U.S.-style “elections” would be illegal in most developed countries, because they inevitably throw up corrupt leaders who offer the public no more than empty slogans and vague promises to disguise their plutocratic loyalties.
In 2018, U.S. party bosses are still determined to divide us along the artificial fault-lines of the 2016 election between two of the most unpopular candidates in history, as if their vacuous slogans, mutual accusations and plutocratic policies define the fixed poles of American politics and our country’s future.
The Political Schizophrenic’s noise machine is working overtime to stuff the alternate visions of Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and other candidates who challenge the corrupt status quo down the “memory hole,” by closing ranks, purging progressives from DNC committees and swamping the airwaves with Trump tweets and Russiagate updates.
Ordinary Americans who try to engage with or confront members of the corrupt political, business and media class find it almost impossible. The Political Schizophrenic moves in a closed and isolated social circle, where the delusions of his fantasy world or “political reality” are accepted as incontrovertible truths. When real people talk about real problems and suggest real solutions to them, he dismisses us as naive idealists. When we question the dogma of his fantasy world, he thinks we are the ones who are out of touch with reality. We cannot communicate with him, because he lives in a different world and speaks a different language.
It is difficult for the winners in any society to recognize that their privileges are the product of a corrupt and unfair system, not of their own superior worth or ability. But the inherent weakness of “inverted totalitarianism” is that the institutions of American politics still exist and can still be made to serve democracy, if and when enough Americans wake up from this Political Schizophrenia, organize around real solutions to real problems, and elect people who are genuinely committed to turning those solutions into public policy.
As I was taught when I worked with schizophrenics as a social worker, they tend to become agitated and angry if you question the reality of their fantasy world. If the patient in question is also armed to the teeth, it is a matter of life and death to handle them with kid gloves.
The danger of a Political Schizophrenic armed with a trillion dollar a year war machine and nuclear weapons is becoming more obvious to more of our neighbors around the world as each year goes by. In 2017, 122 of them voted to approve the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
U.S. allies have pursued an opportunistic policy of appeasement, as many of the same countries did with Germany in the 1930s. But Russia, China and countries in the Global South have gradually begun to take a firmer line, to try to respond to U.S. aggression and to shepherd the world through this incredibly dangerous transitional period to a multipolar, peaceful and sustainable world. The Political Schizophrenic has, predictably, responded with propaganda, demonization, threats and sanctions, now amounting to a Second Cold War.
Ideological Phantom
During the First Cold War, each side presented its own society in an idealized way, but was more honest about the flaws and problems of its opposite number. As a former East German now living in the U.S. explained to me, “When our government and state media told us our society was perfect and wonderful, we knew they were lying to us. So when they told us about all the social problems in America, we assumed they were lying about them too.”
Now living in the U.S., he realized that the picture of life in the U.S. painted by the East German media was quite accurate, and that there really are people sleeping in the street, people with no access to healthcare and widespread poverty.
My East German acquaintance came to regret that Eastern Europe had traded the ills of the Soviet Empire for the ills of the U.S. Empire. Nobody ever explained to him and his friends why this had to be a “take it or leave it” neoliberal package deal, with “shock therapy” and large declines in living standards for most Eastern Europeans. Why could they not have Western-style political freedom without giving up the social protections and standard of living they enjoyed before?
American leaders at the end of the Cold War lacked the wisdom and caution of their predecessors in 1945, and quickly succumbed to what Mikhail Gorbachev now calls “triumphalism.” The version of capitalism and “managed democracy” they expanded into Eastern Europe was the radical neoliberal ideology introduced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and consolidated by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The people of Eastern Europe were no more or less vulnerable to neoliberalism’s siren song than Americans and Western Europeans.
The unconstrained freedom of ruling classes to exploit working people that is the foundation of neoliberalism has always been an Ideological Phantom, as Michael Mann called it, with a hard core of greed and militarism and an outer wrapping of deceptive propaganda.
So the “peace dividend” most people longed for at the end of the Cold War was quickly trumped by the “power dividend.” Now that the U.S. was no longer constrained by the fear of war with the U.S.S.R., it was free to expand its own global military presence and use military force more aggressively. As Michael Mandelbaum of the Council on Foreign Relations crowed to the New York Times as the U.S. prepared to attack Iraq in 1990, “For the first time in 40 years we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War III.”
Without the Cold War to justify U.S. militarism, the prohibition against the threat or use of military force in the UN Charter took on new meaning, and the Ideological Phantom embarked on an urgent quest for political rationales and propaganda narratives to justify what international law clearly defines as the crime of aggression.
During the transition to the incoming Clinton administration after the 1992 election, Madeleine Albright confronted General Colin Powell at a meeting and asked him, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
The correct answer would have been that, after the end of the Cold War, the legitimate defense needs of the U.S. required much smaller, strictly defensive military forces and a greatly reduced military presence around the world. Former Cold Warriors, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Assistant Secretary Lawrence Korb, told the Senate Budget Committee in 1989 that the U.S. military budget could safely be cut in half over 10 years. Instead, it is now even higher than when they said that (after adjusting for inflation).
The U.S.’s Cold War Military Industrial Complex was still dominant in Washington. All it lacked was a new ideology to justify its existence. But that was just an interesting intellectual challenge, almost a game, for the Ideological Phantom.
The ideology that emerged to justify the U.S.’s new imperialism is a narrative of a world threatened by “dictators” and “terrorists,” with only the power of the U.S. military standing between the “free” people of the American Empire and the loss of all we hold dear. Like the fantasy world of the Political Schizophrenic, this is a counter-factual picture of the world that only becomes more ludicrous with each year that passes and each new phase of the ever-expanding humanitarian and military catastrophe it has unleashed.
The Ideological Phantom defends the world against terrorists on a consistently selective and self-serving basis. It is always ready to recruit, arm and support terrorists to fight its enemies, as in Afghanistan and Central America in the 1980s or more recently in Libya and Syria. U.S. support for jihadis in Afghanistan led to the worst act of terrorism on U.S. soil on September 11th 2001.
But that didn’t prevent the U.S. and its allies from supporting the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and other jihadis in Libya less than ten years later, leading to the Manchester Arena bombing by the son of an LIFG member in 2017. And it hasn’t prevented the CIA from pouring thousands of tons of weapons into Syria, from sniper rifles to howitzers, to arm Al Qaeda-led fighters from 2011 to the present.
When it comes to opposing dictators, the Ideological Phantom’s closest allies always include the most oppressive dictators in the world, from Pinochet, Somoza, Suharto, Mbuto and the Shah of Iran to its newest super-client, Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. In the name of freedom and democracy, the U.S. keeps overthrowing democratically elected leaders and replacing them with coup-leaders and dictators, from Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 to Haiti in 2004, Honduras in 2009 and Ukraine in 2014.
Nowhere is the Ideological Phantom more ideologically bankrupt than in the countries the U.S. has dispatched its armed forces and foreign proxy forces to “liberate” since 2001: Afghanistan; Iraq; Libya; Syria; Somalia and Yemen. In every case, ordinary people have been slaughtered, devastated and utterly disillusioned by the ugly reality behind the Phantom’s mask.
In Afghanistan, after 16 years of U.S. occupation, a recent BBC survey found that people feel safer in areas governed by the Taliban. In Iraq, people say their lives were better under Saddam Hussein. Libya has been reduced from one of the most stable and prosperous countries in Africa to a failed state ruled by competing militias, while Somalia, Syria and Yemen have met similar fates.
Incredibly, American ideologists in the 1990s saw the Ideological Phantom’s ability to project counter-factual, glamorized images of itself as a source of irresistible ideological power. In 1997, Major Ralph Peters, who is better known as a best-selling novelist, turned his vivid imagination and skills as a fiction writer to the bright future of the Ideological Phantom in a military journal article titled “Constant Conflict.”
Peters imagined an endless campaign of “information warfare” in which U.S. propagandists, aided by Hollywood and Silicon Valley, would overwhelm other cultures with powerful images of American greatness that their own cultures could not resist.
“One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims,” Peters wrote. “We are already masters of information warfare… (we) will be writing the scripts, producing (the videos) and collecting the royalties.”
But while Peters’ view of U.S. imperialism was based on media, technology and cultural chauvinism, he was not suggesting that the Ideological Phantom would conquer the world without a fight – quite the opposite. Peters’ vision was a war plan, not a futuristic fantasy.
“There will be no peace,” he wrote. “At any given moment for the rest of our lives, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the U.S. armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.”
“To those ends,” he added, “We will do a fair amount of killing.”
Conclusion
After reviewing the early results of the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003, Michael Mann concluded, “We saw in action that the new imperialism turned into simple militarism.”
Without solid economic, political and ideological bases, the Military Giant lacks the economic, political and ideological power and authority required to govern the world beyond its shores. The Military Giant can only destroy and bring chaos, never rebuild or bring order....
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Monday, February 26, 2018
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http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/now-schiff-memo/
And Now the Schiff Memo
The excruciating quandary President Trump presents to the nation is dragging the sad remnant of the thinking class ever-deeper into a netherworld of desperation, paranoia, and mendacity that may exceed even their own official fantasies about the enemy in the White House.
Everything about the lumbering, blundering occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue drives his Dem/Prog opponents — or #Resistance, if you will — plumb batshit: his previous incarnations as a shady NYC real estate schmeikler, as a TV clown, as a business deadbeat, as a self-described pussy-grabber… his vulgar casinos, his mystifying hair-do, his baggy suits and dangling neckties, his arrant, childish, needless lying about trivialities, his intemperate tweets, his unappetizing associates, his loutish behavior in foreign lands, his fractured, tortured syntax, his obvious insincerity, his sneery facial contortions… and lots lots more — and of course that doesn’t even touch the actual policy positions he struggles to articulate. In sum, Trump represents such a monumentally grotesque embarrassment to the permanent Washington establishment that they will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the removal of this odious caitiff.
And in the process abandon all reason and decency.
To complicate matters, there really are policy differences that, despite Mr. Trump’s oafish profferings, must somehow be faced for the sake of the country’s future — two of the clearest, just for example, being whether we will have coherent, enforceable immigration laws and whether we will continue to allow the sale of tactical military rifles to the general public.
These are matters, by the way, which people of sound mind and honorable intentions could actually resolve through open legislative debate. And beyond these two examples stand an array of even deeper, urgent, thorny questions as to how this political economy might navigate through a bottleneck of hardships rushing toward us, namely, the systemic failures of finance, income inequality, health care, education, energy, agriculture and the global competition for dwindling resources.
But the activities of the #Resistance appear determined instead to drive the country needlessly toward war with Russia, the arch-hobgoblin they have conjured up like some Hollywood computer graphical alien monster of slavering insectile malice. Having created the monster, and the story-board to go with it, they have filled their own minds with a horror of their own creation, orders of magnitude worse than the rather pathetic figure of Donald J. Trump, the con-man who surprised himself by getting elected president at an anxious moment in history.
And in creating this horror movie, the #Resistance is dangerously perverting institutions that may not recover from being written into the script. For instance, the Department of Justice, its subsidiary, the FBI, and sundry intel outfits whose highest officers have been enlisted as cast members. Can I be alone in wondering how these agencies can mount massive prosecutions of nobodies like George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates while ignoring the much better documented intrigues of officials such as Bruce Ohr, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Sally Yates, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, John Brennan, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Hillary Clinton, and possibly even the sainted Barack Obama? Or how they can retain any credibility if these figures just slide off into the gloaming with get-out-of-jail-free cards.
In case you’d like to know, I am personally uncomfortable about Donald Trump as President. I can imagine scenarios in which he might have to be removed from office by constitutional means, in particular, the 25th amendment. But the spectacle of roaring dishonesty mounted by his adversaries from even before the election of 2016 disgraces the very class of citizens who we used to depend on to think clearly about the fate of the nation.
And Now the Schiff Memo
The excruciating quandary President Trump presents to the nation is dragging the sad remnant of the thinking class ever-deeper into a netherworld of desperation, paranoia, and mendacity that may exceed even their own official fantasies about the enemy in the White House.
Everything about the lumbering, blundering occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue drives his Dem/Prog opponents — or #Resistance, if you will — plumb batshit: his previous incarnations as a shady NYC real estate schmeikler, as a TV clown, as a business deadbeat, as a self-described pussy-grabber… his vulgar casinos, his mystifying hair-do, his baggy suits and dangling neckties, his arrant, childish, needless lying about trivialities, his intemperate tweets, his unappetizing associates, his loutish behavior in foreign lands, his fractured, tortured syntax, his obvious insincerity, his sneery facial contortions… and lots lots more — and of course that doesn’t even touch the actual policy positions he struggles to articulate. In sum, Trump represents such a monumentally grotesque embarrassment to the permanent Washington establishment that they will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the removal of this odious caitiff.
And in the process abandon all reason and decency.
To complicate matters, there really are policy differences that, despite Mr. Trump’s oafish profferings, must somehow be faced for the sake of the country’s future — two of the clearest, just for example, being whether we will have coherent, enforceable immigration laws and whether we will continue to allow the sale of tactical military rifles to the general public.
These are matters, by the way, which people of sound mind and honorable intentions could actually resolve through open legislative debate. And beyond these two examples stand an array of even deeper, urgent, thorny questions as to how this political economy might navigate through a bottleneck of hardships rushing toward us, namely, the systemic failures of finance, income inequality, health care, education, energy, agriculture and the global competition for dwindling resources.
But the activities of the #Resistance appear determined instead to drive the country needlessly toward war with Russia, the arch-hobgoblin they have conjured up like some Hollywood computer graphical alien monster of slavering insectile malice. Having created the monster, and the story-board to go with it, they have filled their own minds with a horror of their own creation, orders of magnitude worse than the rather pathetic figure of Donald J. Trump, the con-man who surprised himself by getting elected president at an anxious moment in history.
And in creating this horror movie, the #Resistance is dangerously perverting institutions that may not recover from being written into the script. For instance, the Department of Justice, its subsidiary, the FBI, and sundry intel outfits whose highest officers have been enlisted as cast members. Can I be alone in wondering how these agencies can mount massive prosecutions of nobodies like George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates while ignoring the much better documented intrigues of officials such as Bruce Ohr, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Sally Yates, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, John Brennan, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Hillary Clinton, and possibly even the sainted Barack Obama? Or how they can retain any credibility if these figures just slide off into the gloaming with get-out-of-jail-free cards.
In case you’d like to know, I am personally uncomfortable about Donald Trump as President. I can imagine scenarios in which he might have to be removed from office by constitutional means, in particular, the 25th amendment. But the spectacle of roaring dishonesty mounted by his adversaries from even before the election of 2016 disgraces the very class of citizens who we used to depend on to think clearly about the fate of the nation.
Sunday, February 25, 2018
SC159-10
http://www.goldtelegraph.com/debt-on-track-to-destroy-the-american-middle-class/
Debt on Track to Destroy The American Middle Class
Economists report the household debt to be at its highest in decades. Yet, at the same time, we are being told that the economy is doing great. Does anyone see a serious contradiction?
In fact, the current economy only favors the wealthy owing to their flourishing financial assets such as stocks and bonds. Owing to the lack of real assets such as property and commodities, the middle and lower classes are becoming overwhelmed due to the serious consequences of the spending/debt cycle.
American consumers have a collective outstanding household debt of about $13.15 trillion of which nearly $1 trillion is the credit card debt alone, households are truly on a debt binge. These figures should be a wake-up call to all the Americans. The convulsive household debt has surpassed the bubble of 2008 and is still escalating. The economy may not be doing so great, after all.
Compared to 2008, the automobile credit balances have increased to $367 billion whereas the outstanding student loans are around $671 billion. Moreover, 67 percent of household debts belong to consumer mortgages. In 2016, twenty-five percent of all the Americans purchased a new or used vehicle and two-thirds of them are repaying through high-interest, long-term loans.
In fact, the consumer debt has exceeded their income for majority of the Americans.
Consumers have become accustomed using easy credit to maintain a lifestyle unaffordable for them otherwise. If this trend continues, and facts indicate that it will, we will be facing a monumental credit crisis in the near future.
A huge portion of credit card debt is the interest. Credit cards are a convenience and consumers readily pay for the privilege. However, it is necessary for consumers to know how credit card interest actually works.
Take the Smiths, a typical family with $2,000 in credit card debt. The Smiths don’t have a considerable cash reserve and only make a minimum monthly payment of $60.00 at 20 percent interest. The monthly payment against the principal is $26.67 while the interest amount is $33.33. With this payment schedule, the Smiths will pay $4,240 over a period of 15 years.
Mortgages are also a part of the household debt. While outstanding mortgages haven’t reached the bubble of 2008, they have still increased indicating the possibility of another housing crisis in the not-too-distant future. Moreover, with the rising interest rates, the consumer credit may default. Some families rely on credit cards to meet the basic needs. This is the opposite of economic growth.
The decline in automobile sales is already an indication of the future consumer debt crisis. If lenders continue to provide easy access to credit regardless of its looming default and delinquent potential, retail purchase will face a sharp decline in 2018. This will have serious consequences on the overall economy.
The Federal Reserve and other global lenders are a significant contribution to the problem. They allow printing of trillions of dollars and yens for the lenders to distribute to the borrowing consumers at a high interest, leading to a worldwide inflation. All this printed wealth is merely an illusion yet it is raising the cost of living. Prices are rising at an alamingly faster rate compared to the consumer income. There is no increase in real assets. All this is but a mere mushrooming of debt.
The consequences of federal policy will be inescapable unless reversed and there are no signs of any reversal in near or distant future. At this rate, the consumers will soon face a critical financial bubble. Financial assets, such as stocks and bonds, risk losing substantial value. The wealthy can absorb the losses but the poor and middle class will face financial ruin. Consumers need to seriously consider the need to increase their “real” assets, such as real estate and commodities to prevent a long-term financial nightmare.
The chart below shows how the real assets have curved to an all-time low.
It is high time for the American consumers to wake up and stop believing in the magic of easy credit before it is too late. Their upgraded lifestyle is a bubble of an illusion that will burst soon enough.
Debt on Track to Destroy The American Middle Class
Economists report the household debt to be at its highest in decades. Yet, at the same time, we are being told that the economy is doing great. Does anyone see a serious contradiction?
In fact, the current economy only favors the wealthy owing to their flourishing financial assets such as stocks and bonds. Owing to the lack of real assets such as property and commodities, the middle and lower classes are becoming overwhelmed due to the serious consequences of the spending/debt cycle.
American consumers have a collective outstanding household debt of about $13.15 trillion of which nearly $1 trillion is the credit card debt alone, households are truly on a debt binge. These figures should be a wake-up call to all the Americans. The convulsive household debt has surpassed the bubble of 2008 and is still escalating. The economy may not be doing so great, after all.
Compared to 2008, the automobile credit balances have increased to $367 billion whereas the outstanding student loans are around $671 billion. Moreover, 67 percent of household debts belong to consumer mortgages. In 2016, twenty-five percent of all the Americans purchased a new or used vehicle and two-thirds of them are repaying through high-interest, long-term loans.
In fact, the consumer debt has exceeded their income for majority of the Americans.
Consumers have become accustomed using easy credit to maintain a lifestyle unaffordable for them otherwise. If this trend continues, and facts indicate that it will, we will be facing a monumental credit crisis in the near future.
A huge portion of credit card debt is the interest. Credit cards are a convenience and consumers readily pay for the privilege. However, it is necessary for consumers to know how credit card interest actually works.
Take the Smiths, a typical family with $2,000 in credit card debt. The Smiths don’t have a considerable cash reserve and only make a minimum monthly payment of $60.00 at 20 percent interest. The monthly payment against the principal is $26.67 while the interest amount is $33.33. With this payment schedule, the Smiths will pay $4,240 over a period of 15 years.
Mortgages are also a part of the household debt. While outstanding mortgages haven’t reached the bubble of 2008, they have still increased indicating the possibility of another housing crisis in the not-too-distant future. Moreover, with the rising interest rates, the consumer credit may default. Some families rely on credit cards to meet the basic needs. This is the opposite of economic growth.
The decline in automobile sales is already an indication of the future consumer debt crisis. If lenders continue to provide easy access to credit regardless of its looming default and delinquent potential, retail purchase will face a sharp decline in 2018. This will have serious consequences on the overall economy.
The Federal Reserve and other global lenders are a significant contribution to the problem. They allow printing of trillions of dollars and yens for the lenders to distribute to the borrowing consumers at a high interest, leading to a worldwide inflation. All this printed wealth is merely an illusion yet it is raising the cost of living. Prices are rising at an alamingly faster rate compared to the consumer income. There is no increase in real assets. All this is but a mere mushrooming of debt.
The consequences of federal policy will be inescapable unless reversed and there are no signs of any reversal in near or distant future. At this rate, the consumers will soon face a critical financial bubble. Financial assets, such as stocks and bonds, risk losing substantial value. The wealthy can absorb the losses but the poor and middle class will face financial ruin. Consumers need to seriously consider the need to increase their “real” assets, such as real estate and commodities to prevent a long-term financial nightmare.
The chart below shows how the real assets have curved to an all-time low.
It is high time for the American consumers to wake up and stop believing in the magic of easy credit before it is too late. Their upgraded lifestyle is a bubble of an illusion that will burst soon enough.
SC159-9
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48861.htm
Western Lies about Lies over Syria’s East Ghouta
Western governments, their corporate news media, and even the United Nations’ chief Antonio Guterres are once again playing a disgusting, emotive propaganda game over the Syrian war.
UN Secretary General Guterres told the Security Council this week that the East Ghouta enclave near the capital Damascus was “hell on Earth” and called for an immediate ceasefire. His ceasefire call was echoed by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Where is Guterres’ public concern about “hellish conditions” elsewhere? In Gaza where more than a million people are starving under a years-long blockade by a US-backed Israeli regime – in violation of countless UN resolutions? Where is Guterres’ legal or moral authority for Palestinians?
Or for Raqqa, the Syrian city razed to the ground by US air strikes? Or for Iraq’s Mosul, likewise obliterated along with thousands of civilians by US air strikes? Or for Sanaa, the Yemeni capital being bombarded by American-supplied Saudi warplanes?
We don’t recall seeing the UN chief pointedly addressing the Security Council about those situations, and dramatically invoking “hell on Earth”.
The trouble with the Western-orchestrated “concern” over Syria’s East Ghouta is that is so selective, cynical and a sickening sleight of hand.
Western media outlets have this week stepped up airing one-sided footage out of the militant-held East Ghouta suburb, along with shrill demands for the US and other governments to “take action”. The implicit message is for greater military intervention in Syria by NATO nations to confront the Syrian government.
The Syrian government and its ally Russia are being accused of massacring civilians with air strikes on East Ghouta. Russia has denied its forces are deliberately attacking civilian centers, while the Syrian government claims that militants from East Ghouta are launching deadly mortar attacks on nearby Damascus, and therefore has the right to put an end to the insurgents’ fire.
One wonders how Washington, London or Paris would react if in a similar position? Ruthlessly and self-righteously, rebuffing any international concerns as “interfering in its sovereign affairs”.
Shamelessly, Western media outlets are once again giving one side of the story in Syria and a very distorted side too.
They are making tenuous comparisons with the conflict over East Aleppo back in 2016. Back then the Syrian government and Russia forces ended the siege of Syrian’s second largest city by routing militants who had held the eastern quarter for nearly four years.
A victory for the Syrian people was perversely distorted by the Western media to appear as a brutal conquest involving massacre of civilians. This week the Aleppo myth is being reprised in the Western media with the same barefaced lies.
The Washington Post admonished this week, “The world sits by as another massacre unfolds in Syria”. It goes on: “The scenario is similar to the regime’s [sic] slow, destructive reconquest in 2016 of rebel-held [sic] areas in Aleppo”.
Quoting “activists” from East Ghouta, the Post depicts an infernal scenario of “hospitals overflowing with blood”, “graves filled with body parts”, and “children sitting alone amid rubble”.
This is an exact replay of the Western narrative over East Aleppo, when Syria and Russia were accused then of “war crimes” and compared to “Nazi Germany”.
One pressing corrective question is this: why have Western and UN officials, as well as Western media, not gone to report on Aleppo since the city returned to full Syrian government control for over a year now?
Why have these hand-wringing protagonists who were hysterically protesting “war crimes” and “slaughter” in Aleppo not followed up to check on their earlier claims of mass slaughter? Yet they are making the same scripted claims again with regard to East Ghouta.
One reason is that they would find in Aleppo a population which has happily returned to peaceful normalcy after the Syrian and Russian forces liberated the city from the death-grip of terror groups like Al Nusra Front.
That’s why Aleppo is not in the Western “news” any longer. It doesn’t their propaganda narrative.
During the liberation of Aleppo, the Western media relied solely on videos and claims issued by the so-called “humanitarian responders” and “activists” of the White Helmets. This pseudo first-aid group has been unmasked by Vanessa Beeley and other investigative journalists, to be a media arm of the Nusra terror network and its various Islamic State (IS) affiliates.
In East Ghouta, the Western media are again relying on the White Helmets for their “information” about what is going in that enclave, just as they had done in their fabrications over East Aleppo.
Western media are not reporting on a war; they are part of the war, disseminating propaganda for terror groups like Al Nusra, who are covertly sponsored and directed by US, British and French military intelligence to destabilize the country.
The Washington Post deceptively fabulates about East Ghouta as “the last bastion of opposition rebels”. It published a map apparently showing East Ghouta as “rebel-held” and distinct from another area which was designated under the control of “Islamic State”.
All the Western media engage in this sophistry of contriving a seeming separation between “good rebels” and the “terrorists”.
The fact is that East Ghouta has been held under siege by Jaysh al Islam (formerly Liwa al Islam) for the past four years. This group is an affiliate of the cult terror-network comprising Al Nusra and so-called Islamic State. They rule over captured areas with a bloody sword, decapitating anyone deemed to be an “infidel”.
The comparison of East Ghouta with East Aleppo is real enough, but not in the make-believe propaganda nonsense way that Western media are portraying.
Audacious falsification by the Washington Post was further compounded this week when it tried to underscore the suffering in East Ghouta by claiming the area was “hit with chemical weapons in 2013 by the regime [sic]”.
That is an outrageous lie that has been already exposed by several independent journalists, such as Seymour Hersh, who showed that it was the Jaysh al Islam militants (the so-called “good rebels”) who carried out the 2013 atrocity against civilians under its control as a deliberate false flag attempt to trigger US military intervention in Syria. Similar to the stunt pulled last April in Khan Sheikhoun, in Idlib Province, which President Trump reacted to three days later with a barrage of 57 Tomahawk cruise missiles slamming into Syria.
The repugnant irony of Western media and the UN chief calling for tougher Western government intervention in Syria is that it is precisely because of Western governments intervening in Syria for regime change that has resulted in the present devastation and suffering of the country.
Western media will never tell the full story of how past US administrations in league with their NATO allies, Israel and other regional client regimes were plotting for years to destroy Syria as part of a wider war plan to control the oil-rich Middle East.
The proxy war in Syria for the past seven years has followed the war plan laid out by pro-Israeli American imperialists in Washington like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. In their “Clean Break” plan from as far back as 1996, Syria and Iraq were a priority for “roll back” or regime change. The list of Mideast countries targeted by the US for regime change, including Syria and Iraq, was confirmed by American General Wesley Clark in 2007.
This is how the suffering in Syria we are witnessing today has come about.
Want to end the misery and horror in Syria? Then the US and its accomplices, including Britain and France, should get out of Syria and stop waging their covert war for regime change.
Western media will never elucidate that truth because their purpose is to tell lies about lies, and to manipulate Western public into supporting ever-more criminal war.
Western Lies about Lies over Syria’s East Ghouta
Western governments, their corporate news media, and even the United Nations’ chief Antonio Guterres are once again playing a disgusting, emotive propaganda game over the Syrian war.
UN Secretary General Guterres told the Security Council this week that the East Ghouta enclave near the capital Damascus was “hell on Earth” and called for an immediate ceasefire. His ceasefire call was echoed by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Where is Guterres’ public concern about “hellish conditions” elsewhere? In Gaza where more than a million people are starving under a years-long blockade by a US-backed Israeli regime – in violation of countless UN resolutions? Where is Guterres’ legal or moral authority for Palestinians?
Or for Raqqa, the Syrian city razed to the ground by US air strikes? Or for Iraq’s Mosul, likewise obliterated along with thousands of civilians by US air strikes? Or for Sanaa, the Yemeni capital being bombarded by American-supplied Saudi warplanes?
We don’t recall seeing the UN chief pointedly addressing the Security Council about those situations, and dramatically invoking “hell on Earth”.
The trouble with the Western-orchestrated “concern” over Syria’s East Ghouta is that is so selective, cynical and a sickening sleight of hand.
Western media outlets have this week stepped up airing one-sided footage out of the militant-held East Ghouta suburb, along with shrill demands for the US and other governments to “take action”. The implicit message is for greater military intervention in Syria by NATO nations to confront the Syrian government.
The Syrian government and its ally Russia are being accused of massacring civilians with air strikes on East Ghouta. Russia has denied its forces are deliberately attacking civilian centers, while the Syrian government claims that militants from East Ghouta are launching deadly mortar attacks on nearby Damascus, and therefore has the right to put an end to the insurgents’ fire.
One wonders how Washington, London or Paris would react if in a similar position? Ruthlessly and self-righteously, rebuffing any international concerns as “interfering in its sovereign affairs”.
Shamelessly, Western media outlets are once again giving one side of the story in Syria and a very distorted side too.
They are making tenuous comparisons with the conflict over East Aleppo back in 2016. Back then the Syrian government and Russia forces ended the siege of Syrian’s second largest city by routing militants who had held the eastern quarter for nearly four years.
A victory for the Syrian people was perversely distorted by the Western media to appear as a brutal conquest involving massacre of civilians. This week the Aleppo myth is being reprised in the Western media with the same barefaced lies.
The Washington Post admonished this week, “The world sits by as another massacre unfolds in Syria”. It goes on: “The scenario is similar to the regime’s [sic] slow, destructive reconquest in 2016 of rebel-held [sic] areas in Aleppo”.
Quoting “activists” from East Ghouta, the Post depicts an infernal scenario of “hospitals overflowing with blood”, “graves filled with body parts”, and “children sitting alone amid rubble”.
This is an exact replay of the Western narrative over East Aleppo, when Syria and Russia were accused then of “war crimes” and compared to “Nazi Germany”.
One pressing corrective question is this: why have Western and UN officials, as well as Western media, not gone to report on Aleppo since the city returned to full Syrian government control for over a year now?
Why have these hand-wringing protagonists who were hysterically protesting “war crimes” and “slaughter” in Aleppo not followed up to check on their earlier claims of mass slaughter? Yet they are making the same scripted claims again with regard to East Ghouta.
One reason is that they would find in Aleppo a population which has happily returned to peaceful normalcy after the Syrian and Russian forces liberated the city from the death-grip of terror groups like Al Nusra Front.
That’s why Aleppo is not in the Western “news” any longer. It doesn’t their propaganda narrative.
During the liberation of Aleppo, the Western media relied solely on videos and claims issued by the so-called “humanitarian responders” and “activists” of the White Helmets. This pseudo first-aid group has been unmasked by Vanessa Beeley and other investigative journalists, to be a media arm of the Nusra terror network and its various Islamic State (IS) affiliates.
In East Ghouta, the Western media are again relying on the White Helmets for their “information” about what is going in that enclave, just as they had done in their fabrications over East Aleppo.
Western media are not reporting on a war; they are part of the war, disseminating propaganda for terror groups like Al Nusra, who are covertly sponsored and directed by US, British and French military intelligence to destabilize the country.
The Washington Post deceptively fabulates about East Ghouta as “the last bastion of opposition rebels”. It published a map apparently showing East Ghouta as “rebel-held” and distinct from another area which was designated under the control of “Islamic State”.
All the Western media engage in this sophistry of contriving a seeming separation between “good rebels” and the “terrorists”.
The fact is that East Ghouta has been held under siege by Jaysh al Islam (formerly Liwa al Islam) for the past four years. This group is an affiliate of the cult terror-network comprising Al Nusra and so-called Islamic State. They rule over captured areas with a bloody sword, decapitating anyone deemed to be an “infidel”.
The comparison of East Ghouta with East Aleppo is real enough, but not in the make-believe propaganda nonsense way that Western media are portraying.
Audacious falsification by the Washington Post was further compounded this week when it tried to underscore the suffering in East Ghouta by claiming the area was “hit with chemical weapons in 2013 by the regime [sic]”.
That is an outrageous lie that has been already exposed by several independent journalists, such as Seymour Hersh, who showed that it was the Jaysh al Islam militants (the so-called “good rebels”) who carried out the 2013 atrocity against civilians under its control as a deliberate false flag attempt to trigger US military intervention in Syria. Similar to the stunt pulled last April in Khan Sheikhoun, in Idlib Province, which President Trump reacted to three days later with a barrage of 57 Tomahawk cruise missiles slamming into Syria.
The repugnant irony of Western media and the UN chief calling for tougher Western government intervention in Syria is that it is precisely because of Western governments intervening in Syria for regime change that has resulted in the present devastation and suffering of the country.
Western media will never tell the full story of how past US administrations in league with their NATO allies, Israel and other regional client regimes were plotting for years to destroy Syria as part of a wider war plan to control the oil-rich Middle East.
The proxy war in Syria for the past seven years has followed the war plan laid out by pro-Israeli American imperialists in Washington like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. In their “Clean Break” plan from as far back as 1996, Syria and Iraq were a priority for “roll back” or regime change. The list of Mideast countries targeted by the US for regime change, including Syria and Iraq, was confirmed by American General Wesley Clark in 2007.
This is how the suffering in Syria we are witnessing today has come about.
Want to end the misery and horror in Syria? Then the US and its accomplices, including Britain and France, should get out of Syria and stop waging their covert war for regime change.
Western media will never elucidate that truth because their purpose is to tell lies about lies, and to manipulate Western public into supporting ever-more criminal war.
Monday, February 19, 2018
SC159-8
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
Russian Meddling: Gagging on the Irony
The irony of the Deep State's obsessive focus on "Russian meddling" in the precious bodily fluids of our hallowed democracy is so overwhelming that it's gagging. The irony is a noxious confluence of putrid hypocrisy and a comically abject terror at the prospect that the citizenry may be awakening to the terrible reality that America has lost its soul as well as its democracy.
The foul stench of hypocrisy arises from the long and sordid history of America's meddling in the internal politics of virtually every nation on the planet-- a deeply entrenched policy of meddling on such a vast scale that the Deep State minions tasked with projecting a wounded astonishment that some foreign power has the unmitigated gall to attempt to influence our domestic politics must have difficulty restraining their amusement.
America's foreign policy is one of absolute entitlement to influence the domestic affairs and politics of every nation of interest, which to a truly global empire includes every nation on the planet to the degree every nation is a market and/or a potential threat to U.S. interests.
Assassination of elected leaders--no problem. Funding the emergence of new U.S.-directed political parties--just another day at the office. Inciting dissent and discord to destabilize regimes--it's what we do, folks. Funding outright propaganda--one of our enduring specialties. Privatizing public assets to reward our cronies and domestic corporations--nothing's more profitable than a public monopoly transformed into a privately owned monopoly.
(If your nation hasn't been targeted for intervention and campaigns of hard and soft power influence, we apologize for the oversight. We'll get to destabilizing your political order and economy just as soon as the queue of pressing interventions clears a bit.)
One of our most effective means of meddling is economic. First we press the targeted foreign government and civilian power centers--universities, corporations, banks and other institutions--to liberalize the economy and banking system to allow foreign credit and investment in, under the guise of encouraging beneficial development.
Then we flood the economy with cheap, abundant credit, first to buy up natural resources and the most valuable assets, and secondly to fuel a consumption binge that feels like Utopia to credit-starved residents and enterprises: suddenly there's credit to buy almost everything consumers could hope for, and credit to expand production, tourism, etc.
The government is encouraged to borrow to fund large-scale infrastructure projects (which are of course built by foreign firms) and other development projects, with great big slices of the borrowed billions carved off for politicos, functionaries and others in line for bribes, fees and offshore accounts of stolen millions.
This monumental expansion of debt eventually undermines the nation's currency and its economy, as the addictive gush of credit quickly moved beyond sensible, productive projects into speculative ventures with little prospects beyond the initial profits earned by insiders.
As all these marginal projects default, the credit spigot is suddenly shut off, and waves of creditors who thought the good times would last forever go bankrupt.
This destabilization was not an unfortunate side-effect--it was the goal from the start. With the target nation's currency in a freefall and enterprises defaulting left and right, U.S. firms flush with U.S. dollars and banks with nearly unlimited lines of credit in dollars swoop in and offer to ease the pain by scooping up devalued assets for dollars, or extending credit denominated in dollars.
Compared to the scale of these interventions, $100,000 in Facebook adverts is like a pin prick. The indignation and outrage of America's power structure is a tell: how dare you give us a taste of our own medicine--only we're entitled to meddle and intervene as we see fit.
The other source of pungent irony is the failure of America's power structure to maintain the pretense of a functioning democracy and social contract. The nation we inhabit has strayed so far from the nation's founding principles and values that it is unrecognizable. In place of democracy, we have a permanent unelected, impervious-to-the-people Deep State and a pay-to-play system in which political power is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
A mercantile nation that sought to protect sea lanes and trade routes and avoid foreign entanglements has metastasized into an entitled Imperial Project, a Project that enriches domestic corporations and veritable armies of national defense / national security functionaries, think tank and university employees, philanthro-capitalist toadies, media factotums--a nearly endless profusion of beneficiaries of Imperial aspirations.
America's power elite isn't just entitled to intervene and meddle at will globally; it also feels entitled to select America's elected leadership. Elected leaders are anointed in the media, and the citizenry is expected to march to the drumbeat.
That the people failed to follow the directives of their betters was a shock that is still reverberating, hence the power elite's hysterical need to locate a source other than the power elite itself that can be publicly blamed and crucified.
Projection is a well-known psychological coping mechanism. That the loss of the nation's democracy and soul are the direct consequence of the self-serving power elite's own concentration and abuse of power--this is unacceptable. And so the responsibility must be pinned on some external demonic force.
The irony is the American social contract is in tatters due to the self-enriching extremes of the New Gilded Age: an era of unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power in which the citizenry has been reduced to dry tinder awaiting a spark.
Washington and the technocrats are aghast at reports that the opportunistic efforts of Russia-based groups to sow discontent ended up generating 300 million impressions says more about the corruption and abuses of power that have undermined the social order than it does about the diabolical effectiveness of amateurish front groups.
If the U.S. wasn't a nation of haves and have-nots, a nation stripmined by the few at the expense of the many, a nation befuddled by a grotesquely Orwellian media that goes into full propaganda mode if its group-think is questioned, a nation that until recently lauded tech giants whose profits flow exclusively from advertising aimed at users whose engagement is encouraged by just the sort of divisive, emotionally disturbing "news and opinion" that the Russian groups paid for--if the U.S. wasn't a rotten-to-the-core fake-news, fake-recovery, fake-democracy nation, then the modest efforts of the Russian interlopers would have been lost in a sea of legitimacy and authenticity.
The irony that is most gagging is that America's power elite is destroying the nation's social order by its concentration of wealth and abuse of power, yet this power elite claims a handful of social media sites undermined our democracy. How pathetic is that?
The correct question to ask is: what democracy?
....
" Russian meddling "? All of this time since the election, where is the proof? The reality, its all a distraction, Orwellian absurdities meant to accomplish other ends of the PTB
Russian Meddling: Gagging on the Irony
The irony of the Deep State's obsessive focus on "Russian meddling" in the precious bodily fluids of our hallowed democracy is so overwhelming that it's gagging. The irony is a noxious confluence of putrid hypocrisy and a comically abject terror at the prospect that the citizenry may be awakening to the terrible reality that America has lost its soul as well as its democracy.
The foul stench of hypocrisy arises from the long and sordid history of America's meddling in the internal politics of virtually every nation on the planet-- a deeply entrenched policy of meddling on such a vast scale that the Deep State minions tasked with projecting a wounded astonishment that some foreign power has the unmitigated gall to attempt to influence our domestic politics must have difficulty restraining their amusement.
America's foreign policy is one of absolute entitlement to influence the domestic affairs and politics of every nation of interest, which to a truly global empire includes every nation on the planet to the degree every nation is a market and/or a potential threat to U.S. interests.
Assassination of elected leaders--no problem. Funding the emergence of new U.S.-directed political parties--just another day at the office. Inciting dissent and discord to destabilize regimes--it's what we do, folks. Funding outright propaganda--one of our enduring specialties. Privatizing public assets to reward our cronies and domestic corporations--nothing's more profitable than a public monopoly transformed into a privately owned monopoly.
(If your nation hasn't been targeted for intervention and campaigns of hard and soft power influence, we apologize for the oversight. We'll get to destabilizing your political order and economy just as soon as the queue of pressing interventions clears a bit.)
One of our most effective means of meddling is economic. First we press the targeted foreign government and civilian power centers--universities, corporations, banks and other institutions--to liberalize the economy and banking system to allow foreign credit and investment in, under the guise of encouraging beneficial development.
Then we flood the economy with cheap, abundant credit, first to buy up natural resources and the most valuable assets, and secondly to fuel a consumption binge that feels like Utopia to credit-starved residents and enterprises: suddenly there's credit to buy almost everything consumers could hope for, and credit to expand production, tourism, etc.
The government is encouraged to borrow to fund large-scale infrastructure projects (which are of course built by foreign firms) and other development projects, with great big slices of the borrowed billions carved off for politicos, functionaries and others in line for bribes, fees and offshore accounts of stolen millions.
This monumental expansion of debt eventually undermines the nation's currency and its economy, as the addictive gush of credit quickly moved beyond sensible, productive projects into speculative ventures with little prospects beyond the initial profits earned by insiders.
As all these marginal projects default, the credit spigot is suddenly shut off, and waves of creditors who thought the good times would last forever go bankrupt.
This destabilization was not an unfortunate side-effect--it was the goal from the start. With the target nation's currency in a freefall and enterprises defaulting left and right, U.S. firms flush with U.S. dollars and banks with nearly unlimited lines of credit in dollars swoop in and offer to ease the pain by scooping up devalued assets for dollars, or extending credit denominated in dollars.
Compared to the scale of these interventions, $100,000 in Facebook adverts is like a pin prick. The indignation and outrage of America's power structure is a tell: how dare you give us a taste of our own medicine--only we're entitled to meddle and intervene as we see fit.
The other source of pungent irony is the failure of America's power structure to maintain the pretense of a functioning democracy and social contract. The nation we inhabit has strayed so far from the nation's founding principles and values that it is unrecognizable. In place of democracy, we have a permanent unelected, impervious-to-the-people Deep State and a pay-to-play system in which political power is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
A mercantile nation that sought to protect sea lanes and trade routes and avoid foreign entanglements has metastasized into an entitled Imperial Project, a Project that enriches domestic corporations and veritable armies of national defense / national security functionaries, think tank and university employees, philanthro-capitalist toadies, media factotums--a nearly endless profusion of beneficiaries of Imperial aspirations.
America's power elite isn't just entitled to intervene and meddle at will globally; it also feels entitled to select America's elected leadership. Elected leaders are anointed in the media, and the citizenry is expected to march to the drumbeat.
That the people failed to follow the directives of their betters was a shock that is still reverberating, hence the power elite's hysterical need to locate a source other than the power elite itself that can be publicly blamed and crucified.
Projection is a well-known psychological coping mechanism. That the loss of the nation's democracy and soul are the direct consequence of the self-serving power elite's own concentration and abuse of power--this is unacceptable. And so the responsibility must be pinned on some external demonic force.
The irony is the American social contract is in tatters due to the self-enriching extremes of the New Gilded Age: an era of unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power in which the citizenry has been reduced to dry tinder awaiting a spark.
Washington and the technocrats are aghast at reports that the opportunistic efforts of Russia-based groups to sow discontent ended up generating 300 million impressions says more about the corruption and abuses of power that have undermined the social order than it does about the diabolical effectiveness of amateurish front groups.
If the U.S. wasn't a nation of haves and have-nots, a nation stripmined by the few at the expense of the many, a nation befuddled by a grotesquely Orwellian media that goes into full propaganda mode if its group-think is questioned, a nation that until recently lauded tech giants whose profits flow exclusively from advertising aimed at users whose engagement is encouraged by just the sort of divisive, emotionally disturbing "news and opinion" that the Russian groups paid for--if the U.S. wasn't a rotten-to-the-core fake-news, fake-recovery, fake-democracy nation, then the modest efforts of the Russian interlopers would have been lost in a sea of legitimacy and authenticity.
The irony that is most gagging is that America's power elite is destroying the nation's social order by its concentration of wealth and abuse of power, yet this power elite claims a handful of social media sites undermined our democracy. How pathetic is that?
The correct question to ask is: what democracy?
....
" Russian meddling "? All of this time since the election, where is the proof? The reality, its all a distraction, Orwellian absurdities meant to accomplish other ends of the PTB
SC159-7
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-we-fight-fascism/
How We Fight Fascism
In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. Fascism, then in its infancy, was written off by many liberals, socialists and communists as little more than mob rule, terror and street violence. But Zetkin, a German revolutionary, understood its virulence, its seduction and its danger. She warned that the longer the stagnation and rot of a dysfunctional democracy went unaddressed, the more attractive fascism would become. And as 21st-century America’s own capitalist democracy disintegrates, replaced by a naked kleptocracy that disdains the rule of law, the struggle of past anti-fascists mirrors our own. History has amply illustrated where political paralysis, economic decline, hypermilitarism and widespread corruption lead.
Zetkin’s analysis, eerily prophetic and reprinted in the book “Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win,” edited by John Riddell and Mike Taber, highlights the principal features of emerging fascist movements. Fascism, Zetkin warned, arises when capitalism enters a period of crisis and breakdown of the democratic institutions that once offered the possibility of reform and protection from an uninhibited assault by the capitalist class. The unchecked capitalist assault pushes the middle class, the bulwark of a capitalist democracy, into the working class and often poverty. It strips workers of all protection and depresses wages. The longer the economic and social stagnation persists, the more attractive fascism becomes. Zetkin would have warned us that Donald Trump is not the danger; the danger is the growing social and economic inequality that concentrates wealth in the hands of an oligarchic elite and degrades the lives of citizens.
The collapse of a capitalist democracy, she wrote, leaves those in the working class disempowered. Their pleas go unheard. Reforms to address their suffering are cosmetic and useless. Their anger is written off as irrational or racist. A bankrupt liberal class, which formerly made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, ameliorating the worst excesses of capitalism, mouths empty slogans about social justice and the rights of workers while selling them out to capitalist elites. The hypocrisy of the liberal class evokes not only a disdain for it but a hatred for the liberal, democratic values it supposedly espouses. The “virtues” of democracy become distasteful. The crude taunts, threats and insults hurled by fascists at the liberal establishment express a legitimate anger among a betrayed working class. Trump’s coarseness, for this reason, resonates with many pushed to the margins of society. Demoralized workers, who also find no defense of their interests by establishment intellectuals, the press and academics, lose faith in the political process. Realizing the liberal elites have lied to them, they are open to bizarre and fantastic conspiracy theories. Fascists direct this rage and yearning for revenge against an array of phantom enemies, most of them scapegoated minorities.
“What weighs on them above all is the lack of security for their basic existence,” Zetkin wrote of the dispossessed working class.
“Masses in their thousands streamed to fascism,” she went on. “It became an asylum for all the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned. … The petty-bourgeois and intermediate social forces at first vacillate indecisively between the powerful historical camps of the proletariat and bourgeoisie. They are induced to sympathize with the proletariat by their life’s suffering and, in part, by their soul’s noble longings and high ideals, so long as it is revolutionary in its conduct and seems to have prospects for victory. Under the pressure of the masses and their needs, and influenced by this situation, even the fascist leaders are forced to at least flirt with the revolutionary proletariat, even though they may not have any sympathy with it.”
The discredited ideals of democracy are replaced by a hypernationalism that divides the population not by class but between the patriotic and the unpatriotic. National and religious symbols such as the Christian cross and the American flag are fused under fascism. Fascism offers the dispossessed a tangible enemy and a right to physically strike back. Those demonized for a nation’s decline—Jews and communists in Nazi Germany, the kulaks in the Soviet Union and the undocumented, African-Americans and Muslims in the United States—become social pariahs. The stigmatized, along with intellectuals, liberals, gays, feminists and dissidents, are attacked as the embodiment of the disease that has destroyed the nation and will be exorcised by the fascists. This fascist rhetoric is always couched in the language of renewal and moral purity.
“[W]hat [the masses] no longer hoped for from the revolutionary proletarian class and from socialism, they now hoped would be achieved by the most able, strong, determined, and bold elements of every social class,” Zetkin, a close friend of the murdered revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, wrote. “All these forces must come together in a community. And this community, for the fascists, is the nation. … The instrument to achieve fascist ideals is, for them, the state. A strong and authoritarian state that will be their very own creation and their obedient tool. This state will tower high above all differences of party and class.”
Zetkin, a cofounder of the radical Spartacus League, cautioned against demonizing the rank and file of fascist movements. She reminded us that only when the real and profound grievances of those attracted to fascism are addressed can they be pried from its grip.
“The best of them are seeking an escape from deep anguish of the soul,” she wrote of those who joined fascist organizations. “They are longing for new and unshakable ideals and a world outlook that enables them to understand nature, society, and their own life; a world outlook that is not a sterile formula but operates creatively and constructively. Let us not forget that violent fascist gangs are not composed entirely of ruffians of war, mercenaries by choice, and venal lumpens who take pleasure in acts of terror. We also find among them the most energetic forces of these social layers, those most capable of development. We must go to them with conviction and understanding for their condition and their fiery longing, work among them, and show them a solution that does not lead backward but rather forward to communism.”
The highest aesthetic of fascism is war. Its veneration of militarized force and violence, its inability to deal in the world of ideas, nuance and complexity, and its emotional numbness leave it unable to communicate in any language other than threats and coercion. Institutions that pay deference to complexity, that seek to cross cultural barriers to communicate and understand others, are belittled and destroyed by fascists. Diplomacy, scholarship, culture and journalism are an anathema. One obeys, both internally and beyond the nation’s borders, or is crushed. This moral and intellectual vacuum leads fascists to overreach, especially through military adventurism and imperial expansion. They begin long and futile wars that drain the depleted resources of the nation while eradicating civil liberties at home. And in the end, they practice a brutality inside and outside the nation that is genocidal.
Fascism, Zetkin wrote, pits one segment of the working class against another. Last year at the Charlottesville, Va., demonstration that turned deadly, the “antifa” activists and neo-Nazis who clashed came largely from the same dispossessed economic stratum. The divisions created within the working class by fascism, coupled with fascism’s attack on unions, intellectuals, dissidents and the press, foster an uneasy alliance with the capitalist elites, who often view the fascists as imbeciles and buffoons. In essence, much as Trump has done, the capitalists are bought off by fascists with tax cuts, deregulation, the breaking of unions and the dismantling of institutions that carry out oversight and the protection of workers. The expansion of the military, which provides capitalists with increased profit, coupled with the expanded powers of the organs of internal security, binds the capitalist elites to the fascists. Their marriage is one of mutual convenience. This is why the capitalist elites tolerate Trump and endure the international embarrassment he has become.
“There is a blatant contradiction between what fascism promised and what it delivered to the masses,” Zetkin wrote. “All the talk about how the fascist state will place the interests of the nation above everything, once exposed to the wind of reality, burst like a soap bubble. The ‘nation’ revealed itself to be the bourgeoisie; the ideal fascist state revealed itself to be the vulgar, unscrupulous bourgeois class state. … Class contradictions are mightier than all the ideologies that deny their existence.”
“The bourgeoisie needs to use aggressive force to defend itself against the working class,” she wrote. “The old and seemingly ‘apolitical’ repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state no longer provides it with sufficient security. The bourgeoisie moves to create special bands of class struggle against the proletariat. Fascism provides such troops. Although fascism includes revolutionary currents related to its origin and the forces supporting it—currents that could turn against capitalism and its state—it nonetheless develops into a dangerous force for counterrevolution.”
“Fascism clearly will display different features in each country, owing from the given historical circumstances,” she wrote. “But it consists everywhere of an amalgam of brutal, terrorist violence together with deceptive revolutionary phraseology, linking up demagogically with the needs and moods of broad masses of producers.”
In 1932 Zetkin, at 74 the oldest elected member of the Nazi-controlled Reichstag, was by tradition supposed to open the first session of the legislature. She was an object of vitriol in the Nazi press, which attacked her as a “Communist Jew,” a “traitor” and, as Joseph Goebbels called her, a “slut.” The Nazis threatened her with assault if she appeared in the chamber, threats that led her to quip she would be there “dead or alive.” In poor health, she arrived at the Reichstag on a stretcher but at the podium recovered her familiar fire. Her 40-minute speech was one of the last public denunciations of fascism in Nazi Germany. Within a year, the Nazis banned the Communist Party and Zetkin had died in exile in the Soviet Union.
She told the Reichstag:
Our most urgent task today is to form a united front of all working people in order to turn back fascism. All the differences that divide and shackle us—whether founded on political, trade-union, religious, or ideological outlooks—must give way before this imperious historical necessity.
All those who are menaced, all those who suffer, all those who desire freedom must join the united front against fascism and its representatives in government. Working people must assert themselves against fascism. That is the urgent and indispensable precondition for a united front against economic crisis, imperialist war and its causes, and the capitalist mode of production.
The revolt of millions of laboring men and women in Germany against hunger, deprivation, fascist murder, and imperialist war expresses the imperishable destiny of producers the world over. This destiny, shared among us around the world, must find expression through forging an iron-like community of struggle of all working people in every sphere ruled by capitalism.
How We Fight Fascism
In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. Fascism, then in its infancy, was written off by many liberals, socialists and communists as little more than mob rule, terror and street violence. But Zetkin, a German revolutionary, understood its virulence, its seduction and its danger. She warned that the longer the stagnation and rot of a dysfunctional democracy went unaddressed, the more attractive fascism would become. And as 21st-century America’s own capitalist democracy disintegrates, replaced by a naked kleptocracy that disdains the rule of law, the struggle of past anti-fascists mirrors our own. History has amply illustrated where political paralysis, economic decline, hypermilitarism and widespread corruption lead.
Zetkin’s analysis, eerily prophetic and reprinted in the book “Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win,” edited by John Riddell and Mike Taber, highlights the principal features of emerging fascist movements. Fascism, Zetkin warned, arises when capitalism enters a period of crisis and breakdown of the democratic institutions that once offered the possibility of reform and protection from an uninhibited assault by the capitalist class. The unchecked capitalist assault pushes the middle class, the bulwark of a capitalist democracy, into the working class and often poverty. It strips workers of all protection and depresses wages. The longer the economic and social stagnation persists, the more attractive fascism becomes. Zetkin would have warned us that Donald Trump is not the danger; the danger is the growing social and economic inequality that concentrates wealth in the hands of an oligarchic elite and degrades the lives of citizens.
The collapse of a capitalist democracy, she wrote, leaves those in the working class disempowered. Their pleas go unheard. Reforms to address their suffering are cosmetic and useless. Their anger is written off as irrational or racist. A bankrupt liberal class, which formerly made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, ameliorating the worst excesses of capitalism, mouths empty slogans about social justice and the rights of workers while selling them out to capitalist elites. The hypocrisy of the liberal class evokes not only a disdain for it but a hatred for the liberal, democratic values it supposedly espouses. The “virtues” of democracy become distasteful. The crude taunts, threats and insults hurled by fascists at the liberal establishment express a legitimate anger among a betrayed working class. Trump’s coarseness, for this reason, resonates with many pushed to the margins of society. Demoralized workers, who also find no defense of their interests by establishment intellectuals, the press and academics, lose faith in the political process. Realizing the liberal elites have lied to them, they are open to bizarre and fantastic conspiracy theories. Fascists direct this rage and yearning for revenge against an array of phantom enemies, most of them scapegoated minorities.
“What weighs on them above all is the lack of security for their basic existence,” Zetkin wrote of the dispossessed working class.
“Masses in their thousands streamed to fascism,” she went on. “It became an asylum for all the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned. … The petty-bourgeois and intermediate social forces at first vacillate indecisively between the powerful historical camps of the proletariat and bourgeoisie. They are induced to sympathize with the proletariat by their life’s suffering and, in part, by their soul’s noble longings and high ideals, so long as it is revolutionary in its conduct and seems to have prospects for victory. Under the pressure of the masses and their needs, and influenced by this situation, even the fascist leaders are forced to at least flirt with the revolutionary proletariat, even though they may not have any sympathy with it.”
The discredited ideals of democracy are replaced by a hypernationalism that divides the population not by class but between the patriotic and the unpatriotic. National and religious symbols such as the Christian cross and the American flag are fused under fascism. Fascism offers the dispossessed a tangible enemy and a right to physically strike back. Those demonized for a nation’s decline—Jews and communists in Nazi Germany, the kulaks in the Soviet Union and the undocumented, African-Americans and Muslims in the United States—become social pariahs. The stigmatized, along with intellectuals, liberals, gays, feminists and dissidents, are attacked as the embodiment of the disease that has destroyed the nation and will be exorcised by the fascists. This fascist rhetoric is always couched in the language of renewal and moral purity.
“[W]hat [the masses] no longer hoped for from the revolutionary proletarian class and from socialism, they now hoped would be achieved by the most able, strong, determined, and bold elements of every social class,” Zetkin, a close friend of the murdered revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, wrote. “All these forces must come together in a community. And this community, for the fascists, is the nation. … The instrument to achieve fascist ideals is, for them, the state. A strong and authoritarian state that will be their very own creation and their obedient tool. This state will tower high above all differences of party and class.”
Zetkin, a cofounder of the radical Spartacus League, cautioned against demonizing the rank and file of fascist movements. She reminded us that only when the real and profound grievances of those attracted to fascism are addressed can they be pried from its grip.
“The best of them are seeking an escape from deep anguish of the soul,” she wrote of those who joined fascist organizations. “They are longing for new and unshakable ideals and a world outlook that enables them to understand nature, society, and their own life; a world outlook that is not a sterile formula but operates creatively and constructively. Let us not forget that violent fascist gangs are not composed entirely of ruffians of war, mercenaries by choice, and venal lumpens who take pleasure in acts of terror. We also find among them the most energetic forces of these social layers, those most capable of development. We must go to them with conviction and understanding for their condition and their fiery longing, work among them, and show them a solution that does not lead backward but rather forward to communism.”
The highest aesthetic of fascism is war. Its veneration of militarized force and violence, its inability to deal in the world of ideas, nuance and complexity, and its emotional numbness leave it unable to communicate in any language other than threats and coercion. Institutions that pay deference to complexity, that seek to cross cultural barriers to communicate and understand others, are belittled and destroyed by fascists. Diplomacy, scholarship, culture and journalism are an anathema. One obeys, both internally and beyond the nation’s borders, or is crushed. This moral and intellectual vacuum leads fascists to overreach, especially through military adventurism and imperial expansion. They begin long and futile wars that drain the depleted resources of the nation while eradicating civil liberties at home. And in the end, they practice a brutality inside and outside the nation that is genocidal.
Fascism, Zetkin wrote, pits one segment of the working class against another. Last year at the Charlottesville, Va., demonstration that turned deadly, the “antifa” activists and neo-Nazis who clashed came largely from the same dispossessed economic stratum. The divisions created within the working class by fascism, coupled with fascism’s attack on unions, intellectuals, dissidents and the press, foster an uneasy alliance with the capitalist elites, who often view the fascists as imbeciles and buffoons. In essence, much as Trump has done, the capitalists are bought off by fascists with tax cuts, deregulation, the breaking of unions and the dismantling of institutions that carry out oversight and the protection of workers. The expansion of the military, which provides capitalists with increased profit, coupled with the expanded powers of the organs of internal security, binds the capitalist elites to the fascists. Their marriage is one of mutual convenience. This is why the capitalist elites tolerate Trump and endure the international embarrassment he has become.
“There is a blatant contradiction between what fascism promised and what it delivered to the masses,” Zetkin wrote. “All the talk about how the fascist state will place the interests of the nation above everything, once exposed to the wind of reality, burst like a soap bubble. The ‘nation’ revealed itself to be the bourgeoisie; the ideal fascist state revealed itself to be the vulgar, unscrupulous bourgeois class state. … Class contradictions are mightier than all the ideologies that deny their existence.”
“The bourgeoisie needs to use aggressive force to defend itself against the working class,” she wrote. “The old and seemingly ‘apolitical’ repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state no longer provides it with sufficient security. The bourgeoisie moves to create special bands of class struggle against the proletariat. Fascism provides such troops. Although fascism includes revolutionary currents related to its origin and the forces supporting it—currents that could turn against capitalism and its state—it nonetheless develops into a dangerous force for counterrevolution.”
“Fascism clearly will display different features in each country, owing from the given historical circumstances,” she wrote. “But it consists everywhere of an amalgam of brutal, terrorist violence together with deceptive revolutionary phraseology, linking up demagogically with the needs and moods of broad masses of producers.”
In 1932 Zetkin, at 74 the oldest elected member of the Nazi-controlled Reichstag, was by tradition supposed to open the first session of the legislature. She was an object of vitriol in the Nazi press, which attacked her as a “Communist Jew,” a “traitor” and, as Joseph Goebbels called her, a “slut.” The Nazis threatened her with assault if she appeared in the chamber, threats that led her to quip she would be there “dead or alive.” In poor health, she arrived at the Reichstag on a stretcher but at the podium recovered her familiar fire. Her 40-minute speech was one of the last public denunciations of fascism in Nazi Germany. Within a year, the Nazis banned the Communist Party and Zetkin had died in exile in the Soviet Union.
She told the Reichstag:
Our most urgent task today is to form a united front of all working people in order to turn back fascism. All the differences that divide and shackle us—whether founded on political, trade-union, religious, or ideological outlooks—must give way before this imperious historical necessity.
All those who are menaced, all those who suffer, all those who desire freedom must join the united front against fascism and its representatives in government. Working people must assert themselves against fascism. That is the urgent and indispensable precondition for a united front against economic crisis, imperialist war and its causes, and the capitalist mode of production.
The revolt of millions of laboring men and women in Germany against hunger, deprivation, fascist murder, and imperialist war expresses the imperishable destiny of producers the world over. This destiny, shared among us around the world, must find expression through forging an iron-like community of struggle of all working people in every sphere ruled by capitalism.
SC159-6
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/thirteen-russians-ands-ham-sandwich/
Thirteen Russians ands a Ham Sandwich
Remember that one from 1996? Funny, that was the American mainstream media bragging, after the fact, about our own meddling in another nation’s election.
WASHINGTON — A team of American political strategists who helped [California] Gov. Pete Wilson with his abortive presidential bid earlier this year said this week that they served as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s secret campaign weapon in his comeback win over a Communist challenge.
—The Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1996
The beauty in Robert Mueller’s indictment of thirteen Russian Facebook trolls is that they’ll never face trial, so Mr. Mueller will never have to prove his case. In the new misrule of law made popular by the #Me Too movement, accusations suffice to convict the target of an investigation. Kind of sounds like going medieval to me, but that’s how we roll now in the Land of the Free.
Readers know, of course, that I’m not a Trump supporter, that I regard him as a national embarrassment, but I’m much more disturbed by the mindless hysteria ginned up Washington’s permanent bureaucracy in collusion with half a dozen major newspapers and cable news networks, who have run a psy-ops campaign to shove the country into a war mentality.
The New York Times published a doozy of a lead story on Saturday, the day after the indictments were announced. The headline said: Trump’s Conspicuous Silence Leaves a Struggle Against Russia Without a Leader. Dean Baquet and his editorial board are apparently seeking an American Napoleon who will mount a white horse and take our legions into Moscow to teach these rascals a lesson — or something like that.
I’m surely not the only one to notice how this hysteria is designed to distract the public attention from the documented misconduct among FBI, CIA, NSA, State Department officials and the leaders of the #Resistance itself: the Democratic National Committee, its nominee in the 2016 election, HRC, and Barack Obama’s White House inner circle. You would think that at least some of this mischief would have come to Robert Mueller’s attention, since the paper trail of evidence is as broad and cluttered as the DC Beltway itself. It actually looks like the greatest act of bureaucratic ass-covering in US history.
Of course, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was quick to qualify the announced indictments by saying that Russian trolling on Facebook had no effect on the 2016 election, and that the Trump campaign was not implicated in it. Maybe the indictments were just a table-setter for something more potent to come out of Mueller’s office. But what if it’s not. What if this is all he has to show for a year and a half of the most scrupulous delving into this “narrative?”
Meanwhile, the damage done among America’s former thinking class essentially leaves this polity like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz: without a brain. I doubt they will be satisfied by Mueller’s indictment of the thirteen Russian trolls. Rather, it may tempt them to even more violent hysterics and greater acts of lawlessness. The only thing that will stop this nonsense is Big Trouble in the financial system — which the news media and most of the public are ignoring at their peril. It is coming at us good and hard and it will feel like a two-by-four to nation’s skull when it gets here.
Thirteen Russians ands a Ham Sandwich
Remember that one from 1996? Funny, that was the American mainstream media bragging, after the fact, about our own meddling in another nation’s election.
WASHINGTON — A team of American political strategists who helped [California] Gov. Pete Wilson with his abortive presidential bid earlier this year said this week that they served as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s secret campaign weapon in his comeback win over a Communist challenge.
—The Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1996
The beauty in Robert Mueller’s indictment of thirteen Russian Facebook trolls is that they’ll never face trial, so Mr. Mueller will never have to prove his case. In the new misrule of law made popular by the #Me Too movement, accusations suffice to convict the target of an investigation. Kind of sounds like going medieval to me, but that’s how we roll now in the Land of the Free.
Readers know, of course, that I’m not a Trump supporter, that I regard him as a national embarrassment, but I’m much more disturbed by the mindless hysteria ginned up Washington’s permanent bureaucracy in collusion with half a dozen major newspapers and cable news networks, who have run a psy-ops campaign to shove the country into a war mentality.
The New York Times published a doozy of a lead story on Saturday, the day after the indictments were announced. The headline said: Trump’s Conspicuous Silence Leaves a Struggle Against Russia Without a Leader. Dean Baquet and his editorial board are apparently seeking an American Napoleon who will mount a white horse and take our legions into Moscow to teach these rascals a lesson — or something like that.
I’m surely not the only one to notice how this hysteria is designed to distract the public attention from the documented misconduct among FBI, CIA, NSA, State Department officials and the leaders of the #Resistance itself: the Democratic National Committee, its nominee in the 2016 election, HRC, and Barack Obama’s White House inner circle. You would think that at least some of this mischief would have come to Robert Mueller’s attention, since the paper trail of evidence is as broad and cluttered as the DC Beltway itself. It actually looks like the greatest act of bureaucratic ass-covering in US history.
Of course, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was quick to qualify the announced indictments by saying that Russian trolling on Facebook had no effect on the 2016 election, and that the Trump campaign was not implicated in it. Maybe the indictments were just a table-setter for something more potent to come out of Mueller’s office. But what if it’s not. What if this is all he has to show for a year and a half of the most scrupulous delving into this “narrative?”
Meanwhile, the damage done among America’s former thinking class essentially leaves this polity like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz: without a brain. I doubt they will be satisfied by Mueller’s indictment of the thirteen Russian trolls. Rather, it may tempt them to even more violent hysterics and greater acts of lawlessness. The only thing that will stop this nonsense is Big Trouble in the financial system — which the news media and most of the public are ignoring at their peril. It is coming at us good and hard and it will feel like a two-by-four to nation’s skull when it gets here.
Saturday, February 17, 2018
SC159-5
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
Our Approaching Winter of Discontent
That chill you feel in the financial weather presages an unprecedented--and for most people, unexpectedly severe--winter of discontent. Rather than sugarcoat what's coming, let's speak plainly for a change: none of the promises that have been made to you will be kept.
This includes explicit promises to provide income security and healthcare entitlements, etc., and implicit promises that don't need to be stated: a currency that holds its value, high-functioning public infrastructure, etc.
Nearly "free" (to you) healthcare: no.
Generous public pensions: no.
Social Security with an equivalent purchasing power to the checks issued today: no.
As for the implicit promises:
A national currency that holds its value into the future: no.
High-functioning public infrastructure: maybe in a few places, but not something to be taken for granted everywhere.
A working democracy in which common citizens can affect change even if the power structure defends a dysfunctional and corrupt status quo: no.
A higher education system that prepares its graduates for secure jobs in the real-world economy: on average, no.
Cheap, abundant fossil fuels and electricity: during recessionary head-fakes, yes; but as a permanent entitlement: no.
High returns on conventional capital (the kind created and distributed by central banks): no.
A government that can borrow endless trillions of dollars with no impact on interest rates or the real economy: no.
Pay raises that keep up with real-world inflation: no.
Ever-rising corporate profits: no.
You get the idea: the status quo will be unable to keep the myriad promises made to the public, implicitly and explicitly. The reason is not difficult to understand:
Governments jealously protect their right to create currency ("money") out of thin air. This is known as seigniorage. Technically, it's the profit earned by issuing "money" with a market value above the cost of production. For example, if a $100 bill costs 10 cents to produce, the central state's seigniorage is $99.90.
(Central banks are part of the central state. Even though America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is privately owned, it nonetheless functions as the federal government's central bank.)
To reward cronies and win elections, politcos promise everyone more of everything. Major campaign donors are promised tax breaks; powerful corporations are promised government-mandated cartels or monopolies. Private banks are promised cheap credit. Public unions are promised higher wages and heftier benefits. Voters are promised more infrastructure, more education and social spending, and more entitlements.
And so on.
Funding all these ever-expanding promises with cash would require higher taxes. Any attempt to trim the gravy train promised to one group will arouse that constituency to a frenzy of lobbying and noisy proclamations of disaster if even a penny of their promised gravy train is cut.
As for raising taxes, not only is that politically unpopular, it has an economic impact: every additional dollar taken in taxes is one less dollar available to households and enterprises to spend, save or invest.
If every additional tax dollar was recycled into the economy with the same efficiency as private spending and investment, i.e. the new spending decreased household and enterprise costs proportionately, the effects might be roughly neutral or even beneficial, if the public spending leveraged some new efficiency that was available to everyone.
(If a new tax radically reduced the cost of college tuition for every college student, at least some households would be able to offset the higher taxes with significantly lower expenses. The problem with this swapping of public spending for private spending is politically powerful constituencies typically get the extra public spending, and so the citizenry end up subsidizing political favored groups rather than broadly beneficial programs that actually reduce household/ enterprise expenses.)
So how can politicos fulfill their ever-more costly promises without generating political or economic blow-back? Borrow and/or create the money needed to fund the promises. Actually, these are one mechanism, as Japan has shown: the government borrows a trillion, then the central bank creates a trillion out of thin air and buys the government bond with the new trillion.
If central banks can keep interest rates low, the cost of servicing the new debt is modest--or the interest can be paid with more borrowed money. If the central bank buys the new debt, it's like a perpetual-motion financial machine: the government can borrow unlimited currency, as every new Treasury bond is helpfully purchased by the central bank with new currency created out of thin air.
You see the self-reinforcing feedback loop this creates.The ease of borrowing and the initially modest costs of servicing this additional debt encourages more reliance on borrowing as the politically practical way to meet all the promises while placating powerful constituencies and winning re-election.
The consequences of runaway currency creation/government borrowing are not immediately visible, as the financial system's buffers compensate / subdue the adverse effects.
In other words, the unlimited money-creation/borrowing regime appears stable and sustainable as the risks and consequences are buried in the financial system as a whole.
But the apparent lack of consequences doesn't mean there are no consequences. It means the imbalances and extremes are piling up beneath the surface as the system's buffers thin. New extremes are required to keep the system afloat, but there doesn't seem to be any upper limit on money creation or new government debt.
Until the buffers give way, and all the accumulated consequences manifest in sudden fashion. Here is a chart of the black market ("free") Venezuelan Bolivar to the U.S.dollar (data courtesy of dolartoday.com).
We're assured "that can't happen here," but history tells us that eventually it always "happens here." Ten years ago, few middle-class Venezuelans would have believed their national currency could sink to the point that a 100,000 bolivar bill was worth a mere 41 cents in US dollars.
The chart reveals the dynamic: the currency can be debauched for years with little apparent consequence, and then the buffers suddenly collapse and the currency is essentially worthless.
The collapse of the purchasing power of a currency can be slow or fast. Ten years of 10% annual inflation in an economy of near-zero wage inflation will do the trick, or a sudden crisis of faith creates a bidless market for the currency: nobody wants to part with anything of value for the currency.
The terrible financial hurricane wipes out all the accumulated savings (i.e. accumulated purchasing power) of everyone holding the currency as a "store of value." Only those who transferred their currency into durable stores of value before the collapse (stores of value that the desperate government can't expropriate) conserved their savings/ purchasing power.
Just as structures weaken imperceptibly before they collapse in a heap, the undermining of national currencies by excessive issuance of currency/credit and government debt is also imperceptible. The politicos and functionaries in charge of the debauching of the currency are at first nervous that the market might sniff out the debauchery; but the complacent acceptance of their fraud by the markets and the public gives them the green light to increase the issuance of currency and debt.
Their confidence that they can get away with paying yesterday's promises with money borrowed from the future essentially forever builds into an inevitably fatal hubris.
The tragedy is so few act when the collapse is predictably inevitable, but not yet manifesting in daily life. Screaming but we wuz promised won't nullify the hurricane.
Our Approaching Winter of Discontent
That chill you feel in the financial weather presages an unprecedented--and for most people, unexpectedly severe--winter of discontent. Rather than sugarcoat what's coming, let's speak plainly for a change: none of the promises that have been made to you will be kept.
This includes explicit promises to provide income security and healthcare entitlements, etc., and implicit promises that don't need to be stated: a currency that holds its value, high-functioning public infrastructure, etc.
Nearly "free" (to you) healthcare: no.
Generous public pensions: no.
Social Security with an equivalent purchasing power to the checks issued today: no.
As for the implicit promises:
A national currency that holds its value into the future: no.
High-functioning public infrastructure: maybe in a few places, but not something to be taken for granted everywhere.
A working democracy in which common citizens can affect change even if the power structure defends a dysfunctional and corrupt status quo: no.
A higher education system that prepares its graduates for secure jobs in the real-world economy: on average, no.
Cheap, abundant fossil fuels and electricity: during recessionary head-fakes, yes; but as a permanent entitlement: no.
High returns on conventional capital (the kind created and distributed by central banks): no.
A government that can borrow endless trillions of dollars with no impact on interest rates or the real economy: no.
Pay raises that keep up with real-world inflation: no.
Ever-rising corporate profits: no.
You get the idea: the status quo will be unable to keep the myriad promises made to the public, implicitly and explicitly. The reason is not difficult to understand:
Governments jealously protect their right to create currency ("money") out of thin air. This is known as seigniorage. Technically, it's the profit earned by issuing "money" with a market value above the cost of production. For example, if a $100 bill costs 10 cents to produce, the central state's seigniorage is $99.90.
(Central banks are part of the central state. Even though America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is privately owned, it nonetheless functions as the federal government's central bank.)
To reward cronies and win elections, politcos promise everyone more of everything. Major campaign donors are promised tax breaks; powerful corporations are promised government-mandated cartels or monopolies. Private banks are promised cheap credit. Public unions are promised higher wages and heftier benefits. Voters are promised more infrastructure, more education and social spending, and more entitlements.
And so on.
Funding all these ever-expanding promises with cash would require higher taxes. Any attempt to trim the gravy train promised to one group will arouse that constituency to a frenzy of lobbying and noisy proclamations of disaster if even a penny of their promised gravy train is cut.
As for raising taxes, not only is that politically unpopular, it has an economic impact: every additional dollar taken in taxes is one less dollar available to households and enterprises to spend, save or invest.
If every additional tax dollar was recycled into the economy with the same efficiency as private spending and investment, i.e. the new spending decreased household and enterprise costs proportionately, the effects might be roughly neutral or even beneficial, if the public spending leveraged some new efficiency that was available to everyone.
(If a new tax radically reduced the cost of college tuition for every college student, at least some households would be able to offset the higher taxes with significantly lower expenses. The problem with this swapping of public spending for private spending is politically powerful constituencies typically get the extra public spending, and so the citizenry end up subsidizing political favored groups rather than broadly beneficial programs that actually reduce household/ enterprise expenses.)
So how can politicos fulfill their ever-more costly promises without generating political or economic blow-back? Borrow and/or create the money needed to fund the promises. Actually, these are one mechanism, as Japan has shown: the government borrows a trillion, then the central bank creates a trillion out of thin air and buys the government bond with the new trillion.
If central banks can keep interest rates low, the cost of servicing the new debt is modest--or the interest can be paid with more borrowed money. If the central bank buys the new debt, it's like a perpetual-motion financial machine: the government can borrow unlimited currency, as every new Treasury bond is helpfully purchased by the central bank with new currency created out of thin air.
You see the self-reinforcing feedback loop this creates.The ease of borrowing and the initially modest costs of servicing this additional debt encourages more reliance on borrowing as the politically practical way to meet all the promises while placating powerful constituencies and winning re-election.
The consequences of runaway currency creation/government borrowing are not immediately visible, as the financial system's buffers compensate / subdue the adverse effects.
In other words, the unlimited money-creation/borrowing regime appears stable and sustainable as the risks and consequences are buried in the financial system as a whole.
But the apparent lack of consequences doesn't mean there are no consequences. It means the imbalances and extremes are piling up beneath the surface as the system's buffers thin. New extremes are required to keep the system afloat, but there doesn't seem to be any upper limit on money creation or new government debt.
Until the buffers give way, and all the accumulated consequences manifest in sudden fashion. Here is a chart of the black market ("free") Venezuelan Bolivar to the U.S.dollar (data courtesy of dolartoday.com).
We're assured "that can't happen here," but history tells us that eventually it always "happens here." Ten years ago, few middle-class Venezuelans would have believed their national currency could sink to the point that a 100,000 bolivar bill was worth a mere 41 cents in US dollars.
The chart reveals the dynamic: the currency can be debauched for years with little apparent consequence, and then the buffers suddenly collapse and the currency is essentially worthless.
The collapse of the purchasing power of a currency can be slow or fast. Ten years of 10% annual inflation in an economy of near-zero wage inflation will do the trick, or a sudden crisis of faith creates a bidless market for the currency: nobody wants to part with anything of value for the currency.
The terrible financial hurricane wipes out all the accumulated savings (i.e. accumulated purchasing power) of everyone holding the currency as a "store of value." Only those who transferred their currency into durable stores of value before the collapse (stores of value that the desperate government can't expropriate) conserved their savings/ purchasing power.
Just as structures weaken imperceptibly before they collapse in a heap, the undermining of national currencies by excessive issuance of currency/credit and government debt is also imperceptible. The politicos and functionaries in charge of the debauching of the currency are at first nervous that the market might sniff out the debauchery; but the complacent acceptance of their fraud by the markets and the public gives them the green light to increase the issuance of currency and debt.
Their confidence that they can get away with paying yesterday's promises with money borrowed from the future essentially forever builds into an inevitably fatal hubris.
The tragedy is so few act when the collapse is predictably inevitable, but not yet manifesting in daily life. Screaming but we wuz promised won't nullify the hurricane.
SC159-4
https://srsroccoreport.com/u-s-public-debt-surges-175-billion-one-day/
U.S. Public Debt Surges By $175 Billion In One Day
After the U.S. Government passed the new budget and debt increase, with the President’s signature and blessing, happy days are here again. Or are they? As long as the U.S. Government can add debt, then the Global Financial and Economic Ponzi Scheme can continue a bit longer. However, the days of adding one Dollar of debt to increase the GDP by two-three Dollars are gone forever. Now, we are adding three-four Dollars of debt to create an additional Dollar in GDP. This monetary hocus-pocus isn’t sustainable.
Well, it didn’t take long for the U.S. Government to increase the total debt once the debt ceiling limit was lifted. As we can see in the table below from the treasurydirect.gov site, the U.S. public debt increased by a whopping $175 billion in just one day:
I gather it’s true that Americans like to do everything… BIG. In the highlighted yellow part of the table, it shows that the total U.S. public debt outstanding increased from $20.49 trillion on Feb 8th to $20.69 trillion on Feb 9th. Again, that was a cool $175 billion increase in one day. Not bad. If the U.S. Government took that $175 billion and purchased the average median home price of roughly $250,000, they could have purchased nearly three-quarter of a million homes. Yes, in just one day. The actual figure would be 700,000 homes.
Regardless, we are now off to the races when it comes to adding GOBS of DEBT to continue a Ponzi Scheme that would make Bernie Madoff jealous.
There is so much that I want to write about and put into videos, but there is only so much time in the day. I saw Andy Hoffman’s newest video where he let his followers know that he sold the rest of his Gold and was totally out of precious metals and fully invested in Bitcoin and Cryptos. Good for Andy. Unfortunately for Andy, like many who rely on SUPERFICIAL ANALYSIS forgets there is this thing called “ENERGY” that makes everything work. Without energy, the entire SYSTEM comes crashing down. And the most fragile part of the system is HIGH-TECH and especially Bitcoin that consumes a disgusting amount of energy to provide no real productive use. More on that later.
However, if you haven’t watched my newest video on the Huge Market Correction Update & Silver Price Trend, I suggest that you do:
The idea that precious metals are a Barbarous Relic and are no longer useful because High-Tech Cryptos will be the new currency, totally disregards the dire energy predicament we are facing. Andy Hoffman got out of gold and silver and into Cryptos because he, like many, are guilty of SUPERFICIAL THINKING & ANALYSIS. I don’t mean to be harsh here, but when Andy mentions in his video that when the OLD FARTS who believe in precious metals finally die off, then the younger folks will have totally forgotten about gold and silver, get’s my creative juices flowing.
If you do not incorporate the ENERGY DYNAMIC into your analysis or forecasts, you will be totally unprepared for what is coming.
Thus, the BLIND continues to lead the BLIND. So be it.
Anyhow… I will be putting out more work on how the Falling EROI of Energy is destroying everything in its path. Individuals who don’t think the $175 billion increase in U.S. Public Debt has anything to do with the Falling EROI of energy, makes perfect sense why they would follow someone like Andy Hoffman or the other Crypto Aficionados into an even Greater Bubble & Ponzi Scheme than the Fiat Monetary System.
U.S. Public Debt Surges By $175 Billion In One Day
After the U.S. Government passed the new budget and debt increase, with the President’s signature and blessing, happy days are here again. Or are they? As long as the U.S. Government can add debt, then the Global Financial and Economic Ponzi Scheme can continue a bit longer. However, the days of adding one Dollar of debt to increase the GDP by two-three Dollars are gone forever. Now, we are adding three-four Dollars of debt to create an additional Dollar in GDP. This monetary hocus-pocus isn’t sustainable.
Well, it didn’t take long for the U.S. Government to increase the total debt once the debt ceiling limit was lifted. As we can see in the table below from the treasurydirect.gov site, the U.S. public debt increased by a whopping $175 billion in just one day:
I gather it’s true that Americans like to do everything… BIG. In the highlighted yellow part of the table, it shows that the total U.S. public debt outstanding increased from $20.49 trillion on Feb 8th to $20.69 trillion on Feb 9th. Again, that was a cool $175 billion increase in one day. Not bad. If the U.S. Government took that $175 billion and purchased the average median home price of roughly $250,000, they could have purchased nearly three-quarter of a million homes. Yes, in just one day. The actual figure would be 700,000 homes.
Regardless, we are now off to the races when it comes to adding GOBS of DEBT to continue a Ponzi Scheme that would make Bernie Madoff jealous.
There is so much that I want to write about and put into videos, but there is only so much time in the day. I saw Andy Hoffman’s newest video where he let his followers know that he sold the rest of his Gold and was totally out of precious metals and fully invested in Bitcoin and Cryptos. Good for Andy. Unfortunately for Andy, like many who rely on SUPERFICIAL ANALYSIS forgets there is this thing called “ENERGY” that makes everything work. Without energy, the entire SYSTEM comes crashing down. And the most fragile part of the system is HIGH-TECH and especially Bitcoin that consumes a disgusting amount of energy to provide no real productive use. More on that later.
However, if you haven’t watched my newest video on the Huge Market Correction Update & Silver Price Trend, I suggest that you do:
The idea that precious metals are a Barbarous Relic and are no longer useful because High-Tech Cryptos will be the new currency, totally disregards the dire energy predicament we are facing. Andy Hoffman got out of gold and silver and into Cryptos because he, like many, are guilty of SUPERFICIAL THINKING & ANALYSIS. I don’t mean to be harsh here, but when Andy mentions in his video that when the OLD FARTS who believe in precious metals finally die off, then the younger folks will have totally forgotten about gold and silver, get’s my creative juices flowing.
If you do not incorporate the ENERGY DYNAMIC into your analysis or forecasts, you will be totally unprepared for what is coming.
Thus, the BLIND continues to lead the BLIND. So be it.
Anyhow… I will be putting out more work on how the Falling EROI of Energy is destroying everything in its path. Individuals who don’t think the $175 billion increase in U.S. Public Debt has anything to do with the Falling EROI of energy, makes perfect sense why they would follow someone like Andy Hoffman or the other Crypto Aficionados into an even Greater Bubble & Ponzi Scheme than the Fiat Monetary System.
SC159-3
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/113760/worst-threat-we-face-right-here-home
The Worst Threat We Face Is Right Here At Home
The Federal Reserve is ruining us
Last week, volatility made a long-overdue return to the US and global equity markets.
It began with a 2-day back-to-back violent drop. Day 3 saw a big rebound, swiftly followed by two more days of gut-wrentching losses. And then finally, last Friday, the day saw massive swings both high and low, ending with a huge upside run.
During this period the S&P 500 lost more than 300 points. Since then, though, the market has been steadily rising.
Is the danger past? Are the markets safe once more?
And if so, did the markets recover organically? Or were they rescued by The Plunge Protection Team (PPT)?
The answer matters.
If such intervention was rare we could almost justify it, if it took the form of simple, pre-arranged circuit breakers that shut the market down for a "cooling off" after they’ve moved too far, too fast. Indeed, these already exist, and are sufficient in our view.
But if such market interventions are routine, persistent, and generally depended on by the major market participants, then they're highly destructive over the long term.
Sadly, we live with the latter.
Insiders get stinking rich by front-running the scheme (check). Normal adjustments are prevented (check), allowing dangerous bubbles of extreme overvaluation to form (check), while fostering malinvestment (check).
Do this long enough and you end up with a deformed economy, an eroded social structure, and markets that no longer function as appropriate mechanisms for capital distribution and economic signaling.
This is where we find ourselves today.
Modern-Day Soviet Crop Reports
In the former Soviet Union, the communist method of assuring economic progress was to set targets for production. Famous among them were the crop reports.
In these, year after year, the various regional oblast (province) authorities would declare having met or exceeded the crop targets, despite rarely ever truly doing so.
These crop reports were so famously unreliable that the Kremlin leadership eventually took to obtaining their information from US satellite reconnaissance data rather than their own internal reporting from local Communist Party bosses.
Basing next year’s crop planting decisions on these reports often led to famines, and sometimes even mass starvation of entire regions.
Poor data = Bad decisions.
The Soviet crop reports are now a famous example of an unreliable measure that led to disastrous consequences. Because of the false reporting, poor decisions were made. Eventually it became clear to even the Soviets that attempting to centrally micro-manage a major economy is an act of folly.
Too much of this and too little of that were produced. Cement, steel, and auto quotas harmed rather than helped for obvious reasons; poor information flows assured that production decisions were late or flawed or both. All this contributed dearly to the Soviet economy's collapse.
The lessons here are instructive and simple:
centralized management of complex systems doesn’t work, and
bad data leads to bad outcomes
Today’s stock and bond markets are no different than the Soviet crop reports of old. They mainly represent what a small committee of central planners believe are the right numbers to achieve very broad macro-economic goals.
Enormous damage has already been done by the interventions and distortions resulting from the pursuit of the delusional aims of todays central planners (with the world's central banking cartel being the most culpable).
But it's poised to get a lot worse from here.
A Great Irony
The ironic parody of all the current US concern over the possibility of Russian meddling in US elections is that virtually nobody from either political party seems the slightest bit concerned that the US is actually recreating the very worst mistakes of the now-defunct Soviet empire.
In point of fact, the Federal Reserve has done far more self-inflicted harm to long-term US interests than anything that Russia has been accused of, let alone been proven to have done. At this point, there’s no contest between the two.
If the damage inflicted by the Federal Reserve had been done by a terrorist organization, it would for certain be public enemy #1.
Consider that, under the Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen Federal Reserve, the following has occurred:
Pension plans, both public and private have been ruined. Millions of future retirees and taxpayers will not have trillions of dollars they would and should otherwise have to support them in their later years.
Income inequality is at the highest its been in over 100 years
Wealth inequality is also at historical extremes
Student debt is now nearly $1.5 trillion, up ~ $1 trillion since 2007
More than a trillion dollars of interest payments on savings accounts has been forfeited -- denying funds to the next generation for use in business creation, household formation, and education.
Total debt in the US and globally is up massively since the 2008 Great Recession (itself a central banking accident), and now stands at more than $233 trillion worldwide.
These are among a few of the destructive results of the Federal Reserve’s decision to lower interest rates to 0% in order to reward the big banks, well connected private equity firms, and unrestrained government borrowing.
Of course, when you print money (as the Fed does) you cannot create wealth; you only transfer it from one party to another.
Put another way, the Federal Reserve and its foreign partners (the BoJ, ECB, etc.) have been picking winners and losers.
Losers have been seniors dependent on a fixed income, Millennials and every generation following them, and savers, pensioners, and taxpayers. The winners have been the banks, the ultra-rich, entrenched political parties, rentiers, and baby boomers with sizable financial portfolios.
Here's just one example of the kind of devastation the Fed's deeply unfair actions have wrought. A simple Google search on "pension" brings up the following spate of alarming headlines:
The catastrophic losses that will result from these massive pension shortfalls is nothing less than an act of domestic terrorism by the Federal Reserve. They will haunt the US for generations.
There should be serious consequences for destroying the futures of tens of millions of retirees, on purpose --and knowingly -- simply so big banks could not just enjoy fat profits, but record fat profits, for nearly ten years in a row:
Put more bluntly: approximately 90% of US citizens have been financially and economically tossed under the bus simply so that the already-rich could get a little richer. If that’s not a form of terrorism, I don’t know what is.
This chart shows the future burden amassed under the last three Federal Reserve Chairmanships:
None of that could have happened under responsible banking practices. Instead, such excess was enabled and encouraged by an activist Federal Reserve that loosened and loosened some more whenever reality began to exert itself.
They did this to reward themselves and their colleagues and banking associates. It has been a series of self-dealings and unchecked conflicts of interest.
My point here? None of this was done by accident. It has been deliberate and done with full intent to create exactly the conditions in which we find ourselves.
Sure, we could go ahead and obsess over the claim that somehow an insignificant $100k worth of Facebook ads purchased by Russia are somehow responsible for our current misery and overall state of domestic neglect. But we'd be focusing on entirely the wrong parties.
The worst threats we face are right here at home.
Conclusion
As bad as the damage done so far has been, the real pain has not yet begun.
The entire command-and-control system of the US and other western economies and markets has resulted in several decades of increasingly poor decision making and mal-investment.
When it comes to repaying the current global debt levels of ~310 % of GDP, we can confidently predict that such a debt load can never be repaid. They can only try to roll it over as long as they can -- which can't go on much longer without real consequence. Mounting losses are certain at this point.
When it comes to underfunded promises and entitlement programs, such as pensions and social security (clocking in at nearly 800% of GDP!), there’s really only one all-important question that matter at this point: Who’s going to eat the losses?
In Part 2: It's Even Worse Than You Think, we reveal the much further extent of the racket being run against the public by the world central banking cartel, and how it's efforts to continue this racket have sentenced us all to another massive financial/economic crisis -- one that is both now inevitable, necessary, and overdue.
By preventing that which should happen, the central banks have set the stage for an enormously dangerous and disruptive market crash. The kind that forces markets to close for days and weeks on end. The kind that leads to major banking crises punctuated by 'holidays’ where depositors can not access their money. The kind where disorder and social unrest becomes a real risk....
The Worst Threat We Face Is Right Here At Home
The Federal Reserve is ruining us
Last week, volatility made a long-overdue return to the US and global equity markets.
It began with a 2-day back-to-back violent drop. Day 3 saw a big rebound, swiftly followed by two more days of gut-wrentching losses. And then finally, last Friday, the day saw massive swings both high and low, ending with a huge upside run.
During this period the S&P 500 lost more than 300 points. Since then, though, the market has been steadily rising.
Is the danger past? Are the markets safe once more?
And if so, did the markets recover organically? Or were they rescued by The Plunge Protection Team (PPT)?
The answer matters.
If such intervention was rare we could almost justify it, if it took the form of simple, pre-arranged circuit breakers that shut the market down for a "cooling off" after they’ve moved too far, too fast. Indeed, these already exist, and are sufficient in our view.
But if such market interventions are routine, persistent, and generally depended on by the major market participants, then they're highly destructive over the long term.
Sadly, we live with the latter.
Insiders get stinking rich by front-running the scheme (check). Normal adjustments are prevented (check), allowing dangerous bubbles of extreme overvaluation to form (check), while fostering malinvestment (check).
Do this long enough and you end up with a deformed economy, an eroded social structure, and markets that no longer function as appropriate mechanisms for capital distribution and economic signaling.
This is where we find ourselves today.
Modern-Day Soviet Crop Reports
In the former Soviet Union, the communist method of assuring economic progress was to set targets for production. Famous among them were the crop reports.
In these, year after year, the various regional oblast (province) authorities would declare having met or exceeded the crop targets, despite rarely ever truly doing so.
These crop reports were so famously unreliable that the Kremlin leadership eventually took to obtaining their information from US satellite reconnaissance data rather than their own internal reporting from local Communist Party bosses.
Basing next year’s crop planting decisions on these reports often led to famines, and sometimes even mass starvation of entire regions.
Poor data = Bad decisions.
The Soviet crop reports are now a famous example of an unreliable measure that led to disastrous consequences. Because of the false reporting, poor decisions were made. Eventually it became clear to even the Soviets that attempting to centrally micro-manage a major economy is an act of folly.
Too much of this and too little of that were produced. Cement, steel, and auto quotas harmed rather than helped for obvious reasons; poor information flows assured that production decisions were late or flawed or both. All this contributed dearly to the Soviet economy's collapse.
The lessons here are instructive and simple:
centralized management of complex systems doesn’t work, and
bad data leads to bad outcomes
Today’s stock and bond markets are no different than the Soviet crop reports of old. They mainly represent what a small committee of central planners believe are the right numbers to achieve very broad macro-economic goals.
Enormous damage has already been done by the interventions and distortions resulting from the pursuit of the delusional aims of todays central planners (with the world's central banking cartel being the most culpable).
But it's poised to get a lot worse from here.
A Great Irony
The ironic parody of all the current US concern over the possibility of Russian meddling in US elections is that virtually nobody from either political party seems the slightest bit concerned that the US is actually recreating the very worst mistakes of the now-defunct Soviet empire.
In point of fact, the Federal Reserve has done far more self-inflicted harm to long-term US interests than anything that Russia has been accused of, let alone been proven to have done. At this point, there’s no contest between the two.
If the damage inflicted by the Federal Reserve had been done by a terrorist organization, it would for certain be public enemy #1.
Consider that, under the Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen Federal Reserve, the following has occurred:
Pension plans, both public and private have been ruined. Millions of future retirees and taxpayers will not have trillions of dollars they would and should otherwise have to support them in their later years.
Income inequality is at the highest its been in over 100 years
Wealth inequality is also at historical extremes
Student debt is now nearly $1.5 trillion, up ~ $1 trillion since 2007
More than a trillion dollars of interest payments on savings accounts has been forfeited -- denying funds to the next generation for use in business creation, household formation, and education.
Total debt in the US and globally is up massively since the 2008 Great Recession (itself a central banking accident), and now stands at more than $233 trillion worldwide.
These are among a few of the destructive results of the Federal Reserve’s decision to lower interest rates to 0% in order to reward the big banks, well connected private equity firms, and unrestrained government borrowing.
Of course, when you print money (as the Fed does) you cannot create wealth; you only transfer it from one party to another.
Put another way, the Federal Reserve and its foreign partners (the BoJ, ECB, etc.) have been picking winners and losers.
Losers have been seniors dependent on a fixed income, Millennials and every generation following them, and savers, pensioners, and taxpayers. The winners have been the banks, the ultra-rich, entrenched political parties, rentiers, and baby boomers with sizable financial portfolios.
Here's just one example of the kind of devastation the Fed's deeply unfair actions have wrought. A simple Google search on "pension" brings up the following spate of alarming headlines:
The catastrophic losses that will result from these massive pension shortfalls is nothing less than an act of domestic terrorism by the Federal Reserve. They will haunt the US for generations.
There should be serious consequences for destroying the futures of tens of millions of retirees, on purpose --and knowingly -- simply so big banks could not just enjoy fat profits, but record fat profits, for nearly ten years in a row:
Put more bluntly: approximately 90% of US citizens have been financially and economically tossed under the bus simply so that the already-rich could get a little richer. If that’s not a form of terrorism, I don’t know what is.
This chart shows the future burden amassed under the last three Federal Reserve Chairmanships:
None of that could have happened under responsible banking practices. Instead, such excess was enabled and encouraged by an activist Federal Reserve that loosened and loosened some more whenever reality began to exert itself.
They did this to reward themselves and their colleagues and banking associates. It has been a series of self-dealings and unchecked conflicts of interest.
My point here? None of this was done by accident. It has been deliberate and done with full intent to create exactly the conditions in which we find ourselves.
Sure, we could go ahead and obsess over the claim that somehow an insignificant $100k worth of Facebook ads purchased by Russia are somehow responsible for our current misery and overall state of domestic neglect. But we'd be focusing on entirely the wrong parties.
The worst threats we face are right here at home.
Conclusion
As bad as the damage done so far has been, the real pain has not yet begun.
The entire command-and-control system of the US and other western economies and markets has resulted in several decades of increasingly poor decision making and mal-investment.
When it comes to repaying the current global debt levels of ~310 % of GDP, we can confidently predict that such a debt load can never be repaid. They can only try to roll it over as long as they can -- which can't go on much longer without real consequence. Mounting losses are certain at this point.
When it comes to underfunded promises and entitlement programs, such as pensions and social security (clocking in at nearly 800% of GDP!), there’s really only one all-important question that matter at this point: Who’s going to eat the losses?
In Part 2: It's Even Worse Than You Think, we reveal the much further extent of the racket being run against the public by the world central banking cartel, and how it's efforts to continue this racket have sentenced us all to another massive financial/economic crisis -- one that is both now inevitable, necessary, and overdue.
By preventing that which should happen, the central banks have set the stage for an enormously dangerous and disruptive market crash. The kind that forces markets to close for days and weeks on end. The kind that leads to major banking crises punctuated by 'holidays’ where depositors can not access their money. The kind where disorder and social unrest becomes a real risk....
Sunday, February 11, 2018
SC159-2
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/deadly-rule-oligarchs/
The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs
Oligarchic rule, as Aristotle pointed out, is a deviant form of government. Oligarchs care nothing for competency, intelligence, honesty, rationality, self-sacrifice or the common good. They pervert, deform and dismantle systems of power to serve their immediate interests, squandering the future for short-term personal gain. “The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments that rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, of the few or of the many, are perversions,” Aristotle wrote. The classicist Peter L.P. Simpson calls these perversions the “sophistry of oligarchs,” meaning that once oligarchs take power, rational, prudent and thoughtful responses to social, economic and political problems are ignored to feed insatiable greed. The late stage of every civilization is characterized by the sophistry of oligarchs, who ravage the decaying carcass of the state.
These deviant forms of government are defined by common characteristics, most of which Aristotle understood. Oligarchs use power and ruling structures solely for personal advancement.
Oligarchs, though they speak of deconstructing the administrative state, actually increase deficits and the size and power of law enforcement and the military to protect their global business interests and ensure domestic social control. The parts of the state that serve the common good wither in the name of deregulation and austerity. The parts that promote the oligarchs’ power expand in the name of national security, economic growth and law and order.
For example, the oligarchs educate their children in private schools and buy them admissions into elite universities (this is how a mediocre student like Jared Kushner went to Harvard and Donald Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania), so they see no need to fund good public education for the wider population. Oligarchs can pay teams of high-priced lawyers to bail them and their families out of legal trouble. There is no need, in their eyes, to provide funds for legal representation for the poor. When oligarchs do not fly on private jets, they fly in first class, so they permit airlines to fleece and abuse “economy” passengers. They do not use subways, buses or trains, and they slash funds for the maintenance and improvement of these services. Oligarchs have private clinics and private doctors, so they do not want to pay for public health or Medicare. Oligarchs detest the press, which when it works shines a light on their corruption and mendacity, so they buy up and control systems of information and push their critics to the margins of society, something they will accelerate with the abolition of net neutrality.
Oligarchs do not vacation on public beaches or in public parks. They own their own land and estates, where we are not allowed. They see no reason to maintain or fund public parks or protect public land. They hand such land over to other oligarchs to exploit for profit. Oligarchs cynically view laws as mechanisms to legalize their fraud and plunder. They use their lobbyists in the legislative branch of government to author bills that increase and protect their wealth, through the avoidance of taxes and other means. Oligarchs do not allow free and fair elections. They use gerrymandering and campaign contributions to make sure other oligarchs are elected over and over to office. Many run unopposed.
Oligarchs look at regulations to protect the environment or the safety of workers as impediments to profit and abolish them. Oligarchs move industries to Mexico or China to increase their wealth while impoverishing American workers and leaving U.S. cities in ruins. Oligarchs are philistines. They are deaf, dumb and blind to great works of art, reveling in tawdry spectacles, patriotic kitsch and mindless entertainment. They despise artists and intellectuals who promote virtues and self-criticism that conflict with the lust for power, celebrity and wealth. Oligarchs always unleash wars on culture, attacking it as elitist, irrelevant and immoral and cutting its funding. All social services and institutions, such as public housing programs, public parks, meals for the elderly, infrastructure projects, welfare and Social Security, are viewed by oligarchs as a waste of money. These services are gutted or turned over to fellow oligarchs, who harvest them for profit until they are destroyed.
Oligarchs, who do not serve in the military and who ensure their children do not serve in the military, pretend to be great patriots. They attack those who oppose them as anti-American, traitors or agents for a foreign power. They use the language of patriotism to stoke hatred against their critics and to justify their crimes. They see the world in black and white—those who are loyal to them and those who are the enemy. They extent this stunted belief system to foreign affairs. Diplomacy is abandoned for the crude threats and indiscriminate use of force that are the preferred forms of communication of all despots.
There is little dispute that we live in an oligarchic state. The wealthiest 1 percent of America’s families control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, a statistic similar to what is seen globally: The wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population owns more than half of the world’s wealth. This wealth translates into political power. The political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, after examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, concluded, “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”
Oligarchs accelerate social, political, cultural and economic collapse. The unchecked plunder leads to systems breakdown. The refusal to protect natural resources, or the economic engines that sustain the state, means that poverty becomes the norm and the natural world becomes a toxic wasteland. Basic institutions no longer work. Infrastructure is no longer reliable. Water, air and soil are poisoned. The population is left uneducated, untrained, impoverished, oppressed by organs of internal security and beset by despair. The state eventually goes bankrupt. Oligarchs respond to this steady deterioration by forcing workers to do more for less and launching self-destructive wars in the vain attempt to restore a lost golden age. They also insist, no matter how bad it gets, on maintaining their opulent and hedonistic lifestyles. They further tax the resources of the state, the ecosystem and the population with suicidal demands. They flee from the looming chaos into their gated compounds, modern versions of Versailles or the Forbidden City. They lose touch with reality. In the end, they are overthrown or destroy the state itself. There is no institution left in America that can be called democratic, and thus there is no internal mechanism to prevent a descent into barbarity.
“The political role of corporate power, the corruption of the political and representative processes by the lobbying industry, the expansion of executive power at the expense of constitutional limitations, and the degradation of political dialogue promoted by the media are the basics of the system, not excrescences upon it,” the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin wrote in “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.” “The system would remain in place even if the Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as if foreshadowed in the timidity of the current Democratic proposals for reform. In the last analysis, the much-lauded stability and conservatism of the American system owe nothing to lofty ideals, and everything to the irrefutable fact that it is shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors. When a minimum of a million dollars is required of House candidates and elected judges, and when patriotism is for the draft-free to extol and for the ordinary citizen to serve, in such times it is a simple act of bad faith to claim that politics-as-we-now-know-it can miraculously cure the evils which are essential to its very existence.”
The longer we are ruled by oligarchs, the deadlier our predicament becomes, especially since the oligarchs refuse to address climate change, the greatest existential crisis to humankind. The oligarchs have many mechanisms, including wholesale surveillance, to keep us in check. They will stop at nothing to maintain the sophistry of their rule. History may not repeat itself, but it echoes. And if we don’t recognize these echoes and then revolt, we will be herded into the abattoirs that tyrannies set up at the end of their existence.
The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs
Oligarchic rule, as Aristotle pointed out, is a deviant form of government. Oligarchs care nothing for competency, intelligence, honesty, rationality, self-sacrifice or the common good. They pervert, deform and dismantle systems of power to serve their immediate interests, squandering the future for short-term personal gain. “The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments that rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, of the few or of the many, are perversions,” Aristotle wrote. The classicist Peter L.P. Simpson calls these perversions the “sophistry of oligarchs,” meaning that once oligarchs take power, rational, prudent and thoughtful responses to social, economic and political problems are ignored to feed insatiable greed. The late stage of every civilization is characterized by the sophistry of oligarchs, who ravage the decaying carcass of the state.
These deviant forms of government are defined by common characteristics, most of which Aristotle understood. Oligarchs use power and ruling structures solely for personal advancement.
Oligarchs, though they speak of deconstructing the administrative state, actually increase deficits and the size and power of law enforcement and the military to protect their global business interests and ensure domestic social control. The parts of the state that serve the common good wither in the name of deregulation and austerity. The parts that promote the oligarchs’ power expand in the name of national security, economic growth and law and order.
For example, the oligarchs educate their children in private schools and buy them admissions into elite universities (this is how a mediocre student like Jared Kushner went to Harvard and Donald Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania), so they see no need to fund good public education for the wider population. Oligarchs can pay teams of high-priced lawyers to bail them and their families out of legal trouble. There is no need, in their eyes, to provide funds for legal representation for the poor. When oligarchs do not fly on private jets, they fly in first class, so they permit airlines to fleece and abuse “economy” passengers. They do not use subways, buses or trains, and they slash funds for the maintenance and improvement of these services. Oligarchs have private clinics and private doctors, so they do not want to pay for public health or Medicare. Oligarchs detest the press, which when it works shines a light on their corruption and mendacity, so they buy up and control systems of information and push their critics to the margins of society, something they will accelerate with the abolition of net neutrality.
Oligarchs do not vacation on public beaches or in public parks. They own their own land and estates, where we are not allowed. They see no reason to maintain or fund public parks or protect public land. They hand such land over to other oligarchs to exploit for profit. Oligarchs cynically view laws as mechanisms to legalize their fraud and plunder. They use their lobbyists in the legislative branch of government to author bills that increase and protect their wealth, through the avoidance of taxes and other means. Oligarchs do not allow free and fair elections. They use gerrymandering and campaign contributions to make sure other oligarchs are elected over and over to office. Many run unopposed.
Oligarchs look at regulations to protect the environment or the safety of workers as impediments to profit and abolish them. Oligarchs move industries to Mexico or China to increase their wealth while impoverishing American workers and leaving U.S. cities in ruins. Oligarchs are philistines. They are deaf, dumb and blind to great works of art, reveling in tawdry spectacles, patriotic kitsch and mindless entertainment. They despise artists and intellectuals who promote virtues and self-criticism that conflict with the lust for power, celebrity and wealth. Oligarchs always unleash wars on culture, attacking it as elitist, irrelevant and immoral and cutting its funding. All social services and institutions, such as public housing programs, public parks, meals for the elderly, infrastructure projects, welfare and Social Security, are viewed by oligarchs as a waste of money. These services are gutted or turned over to fellow oligarchs, who harvest them for profit until they are destroyed.
Oligarchs, who do not serve in the military and who ensure their children do not serve in the military, pretend to be great patriots. They attack those who oppose them as anti-American, traitors or agents for a foreign power. They use the language of patriotism to stoke hatred against their critics and to justify their crimes. They see the world in black and white—those who are loyal to them and those who are the enemy. They extent this stunted belief system to foreign affairs. Diplomacy is abandoned for the crude threats and indiscriminate use of force that are the preferred forms of communication of all despots.
There is little dispute that we live in an oligarchic state. The wealthiest 1 percent of America’s families control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, a statistic similar to what is seen globally: The wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population owns more than half of the world’s wealth. This wealth translates into political power. The political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, after examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, concluded, “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”
Oligarchs accelerate social, political, cultural and economic collapse. The unchecked plunder leads to systems breakdown. The refusal to protect natural resources, or the economic engines that sustain the state, means that poverty becomes the norm and the natural world becomes a toxic wasteland. Basic institutions no longer work. Infrastructure is no longer reliable. Water, air and soil are poisoned. The population is left uneducated, untrained, impoverished, oppressed by organs of internal security and beset by despair. The state eventually goes bankrupt. Oligarchs respond to this steady deterioration by forcing workers to do more for less and launching self-destructive wars in the vain attempt to restore a lost golden age. They also insist, no matter how bad it gets, on maintaining their opulent and hedonistic lifestyles. They further tax the resources of the state, the ecosystem and the population with suicidal demands. They flee from the looming chaos into their gated compounds, modern versions of Versailles or the Forbidden City. They lose touch with reality. In the end, they are overthrown or destroy the state itself. There is no institution left in America that can be called democratic, and thus there is no internal mechanism to prevent a descent into barbarity.
“The political role of corporate power, the corruption of the political and representative processes by the lobbying industry, the expansion of executive power at the expense of constitutional limitations, and the degradation of political dialogue promoted by the media are the basics of the system, not excrescences upon it,” the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin wrote in “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.” “The system would remain in place even if the Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as if foreshadowed in the timidity of the current Democratic proposals for reform. In the last analysis, the much-lauded stability and conservatism of the American system owe nothing to lofty ideals, and everything to the irrefutable fact that it is shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors. When a minimum of a million dollars is required of House candidates and elected judges, and when patriotism is for the draft-free to extol and for the ordinary citizen to serve, in such times it is a simple act of bad faith to claim that politics-as-we-now-know-it can miraculously cure the evils which are essential to its very existence.”
The longer we are ruled by oligarchs, the deadlier our predicament becomes, especially since the oligarchs refuse to address climate change, the greatest existential crisis to humankind. The oligarchs have many mechanisms, including wholesale surveillance, to keep us in check. They will stop at nothing to maintain the sophistry of their rule. History may not repeat itself, but it echoes. And if we don’t recognize these echoes and then revolt, we will be herded into the abattoirs that tyrannies set up at the end of their existence.
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