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https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/10/29/the-consequences-of-system-failure/

The Consequences of System Failure

In short, every major political institution has been increasingly discredited as Brazil has spiraled deeper and deeper into a dark void. And from the abyss emerged a former army captain and six-term congressman from Rio de Janeiro, Jair Bolsonaro, with the slogan “Brazil above everything, God above everyone,” and promises to fix everything with hardline tactics.

– From today’s Intercept article: Jair Bolsonaro Is Elected President of Brazil. Read His Extremist, Far-Right Positions in His Own Words.

It’s been only a little over two years since the people of Great Britain surprised the world by voting to leave the European Union. Just a few months later, this nascent trend of political shock continued with the election of Donald Trump.

This tectonic shift toward political upheaval has continued to spread throughout much of the world, with Italy and Brazil being two more recent examples. That something very major and very global is happening is undeniable at this point, yet everyone seems to have their own pet reasons for why it’s occurring. I continue to stick to the same thesis I’ve had for nearly a decade, which is that the dominant global economic/financial paradigm led and managed by the U.S. has failed and is experiencing a slow, painful and dangerous death.

This reality was temporarily papered over by the shady and extremely corrupt financial bailouts of a decade ago. An event that focused all government resources on rescuing the already rich and powerful, while keeping bank executives out of prison.

Ten years ago, all of America’s resources were irresponsibly and aggressively marshaled toward the sole purpose of resuscitating a dead system and keeping it on life support. Rather than jail those who committed egregious fraud and ask the difficult questions about the sustainability of the global financial system, those in charge pretended nothing was wrong and just threw money at the problem. This (coincidentally I’m sure) ended up making those who were rich and powerful before the crisis even more rich and powerful after it. Now it’s 2018 and the world’s staring straight into the face of a gigantic unpayable debt bubble, as well as an overextended and hyper-aggressive U.S. empire abroad.

Incredibly enough, many people still have no conception of what’s actually going on.

What’s been most shocking and disturbing to me — both following the financial crisis and in the aftermath of every new “surprise” election result — is the continued inability of so many people to face reality. The dominant reaction to Trump’s election in the U.S. has been a pathetic joke of a political movement based on fantasy and delusion known as “The Resistance.” A collection of mindless self-proclaimed liberals who actively resurrected George W. Bush’s reputation while running into the arms of opportunistic neocons simply because they couldn’t admit that Obama was a guardian of elitist interests, and Hillary an atrocious candidate.

So they’ve spent two years blaming Russia, blaming Facebook, blaming deplorables, blaming everything imaginable rather than accepting reality. Indeed, we seem to have a cultural addiction to denying reality. We did it after the financial crisis and we’re doing it again in the aftermath of Trump’s election. There’s a large group of people who just want to rewind history back to the way things were, but that world’s gone and it’s not coming back.

When I left Wall Street back in 2010, I naively thought by embracing a passion for liberty and sharing what I knew about the financial crisis I could make a difference to the debate. My efforts proved an abject failure, but the process taught me some painful yet valuable lessons. First, that the wheels of history are going to turn in the way they’re going to turn and there’s not much I can do about it. Second, that more often than not the societal response to system failure is a rejection of freedom and liberty in favor of easier, jingoistic and often darker solutions.

Although I’ve begrudgingly accepted this reality, I haven’t given up. I’ve increasingly turned my attention inward, toward my family and my own individual action. The only things I can impact with any degree of certainty are the things closest to me, so I’ve tried to focus on self-improvement in the small areas of everyday life. I can’t force people to look under the hood of our vast societal problems and focus on root issues versus symptoms. Unfortunately, it seems many people, and indeed entire societies, often have to learn lessons the hard way.

The time for liberty will come, but I fear we’ll see increased hardship first. This is why I remain short-term concerned, but long-term optimistic. We’re still in a very dark stage in this particular cycle of human progress and the longer we remain in denial about what’s happening, the longer this period will last.

My personal hope and challenge is that I do no harm while also adding some joy, knowledge and happiness to the world as we transition from one paradigm to the next. I wish everyone luck, peace and fortitude as we march, crazed, into the vast unknown.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50528.htm

America’s Nuclear Death Wish – Europe Must Rebel

The Trump administration’s declared scrapping of a crucial arms control treaty is putting the world on notice of a nuclear war, sooner or later.

Any such war is not winnable. It is mutually assured destruction. Yet the arrogant American rulers – some of them at least – seem to be deluded in thinking they can win such a war.

What makes the American position even more execrable is that it is being pushed by people who have never fought a war. Indeed, by people like President Donald Trump and his hawkish national security advisor John Bolton who both dodged military service to their country during the Vietnam War. How’s that for macabre mockery? The world is being pushed to war by a bunch of effete cowards who are clueless about war.

Trump announced last this week that the US was finally pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a move confirmed by Bolton on a follow-up trip to Moscow. That treaty was signed in 1987 by former President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a landmark achievement of cooperation and trust between the nuclear superpowers. Both sides removed short and medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe.

With Trump intending to rip up the INF Treaty, as his predecessor GW Bush had done with the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, Europe is now facing the disastrous prospect of American missiles being reinstalled across its territory as they were in the 1980s. However, a big distinction between then and now is that after years of expansion by NATO, European territory is at an even sharper interface with Russia’s heartland.

When the INF Treaty was implemented three decades ago, the US and Russian nuclear arsenals were seriously dialed back to the strategic level of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) confined on respective landmasses separated by thousands of kilometers. As Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of Natsionalnaya Oborona, told Russia’s Vesti news channel, the ICBMs typically have a flight time of 30 minutes from launch. That time gap would give Russian defense systems time to respond effectively to an incoming strike from the US, and vice versa.

But, as Korotchenko noted, the impending installation of intermediate-range missiles by the Americans in European states will reduce the flight time of a possible US nuclear strike on Russia to a couple of minutes, even seconds. That would seriously challenge Russian anti-missile defenses, as well as greatly increasing the margin of error in detecting a strike, possibly leading to mistaken escalation. In other words, the strategic balance has been thrown into disarray by the US over the INF, just as it was again thrown into disarray back in 2002 when Bush trashed the ABM.

It also presents the Americans with the temptation to exercise their “first-strike doctrine”. In US military planning, it reserves the “right” to use a pre-emptive attack. By contrast, Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated again last week that Russia will never use a first-strike option, that it would only use nuclear weapons as a defensive action.

Recall that earlier this month, the US envoy to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, said that American forces would “take out” Russian missiles if they are deemed to be violating the INF. It was an appalling expression of the pre-emptive prerogative that Washington grants itself, even though the information upon which it would base its action is highly questionable.

Putting the American logic together one can say that the US rulers have a death wish on the planet. With criminal recklessness, they are moving to loosen the international controls over deploying nuclear weapons and are creating a situation in Europe that puts nuclear war on a hair-trigger.

Moscow vowed last week that it will respond “militarily” if Washington goes ahead with scrapping the INF Treaty. Russia can be expected to counter by deploying shorter-range missiles that will put NATO-allied Europe in the firing line.

Surely, the European states must be asking themselves what kind of ally they supposedly have in the US. What kind of ally puts its supposed friends in the firing line, under the name of “protecting them”, while it remains at relatively safer distance?

The European Union has reacted to Trump’s announced withdrawal from the INF Treaty with horror. The EU is calling on the US to adhere to the treaty and to negotiate with Russia over purported complaints. French President Emmanuel Macron telephoned Trump, appealing that the treaty has been a vital element of Europe’s peace for the past 30 years.

Washington has been claiming for the past four years, since the Obama administration, that Russia is violating the INF by allegedly developing medium-range, ground-launched cruise missiles. Moscow has repeatedly denied the claims, pointing out that the Americans have not presented evidence to back up their accusations. Washington says its information is classified, and so can’t be publicly revealed. That’s hardly convincing given past American deceptions over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Iran and Syria.

In any case, it is the Americans who are making a big deal about the alleged Russian violations of the INF. If the Europeans were really concerned, why haven’t they kicked up a fuss? The fact that the Europeans are pleading with Washington to adhere to the INF suggests that they are not convinced by allegations of Russia posing a missile threat.

Moreover, if there are disputes and complaints from the American side, then let them iron these problems out through diplomacy and negotiation.

It is telling that the US wants to instead escalate the tensions and the risks of war in such a reckless manner. That betrays its real agenda of seeking to militarize problems, rather than exploring political solutions. The difference it seems comes down to the US not actually having a valid political argument, so it must exercise its power through militarism as a way to conceal its lack of rational validity.

The root problem of INF Treaty tensions and alleged violations stems from the US-led configuration of military forces encroaching ever-closer on Russian territory. If the US were genuinely interested in ensuring security and peace in Europe then it would listen to Russia’s concern over the provocative expansion of US-led NATO forces towards its Western border. When Reagan signed the INF with Gorbachev it was on the understanding and commitment from the US side not to advance its military towards Russia “by one inch”. In 30 years, US forces have pushed all the way from Germany to the Baltic and Black Seas on Russia’s doorstep. Washington is trying to enlist Ukraine and Georgia into the NATO alliance, indeed is carrying out war drills with these two former Soviet Union states which share borders with Russia.

If the US now re-installs medium-range nuclear missiles with flight times to Moscow down to a matter of seconds then we can lament that the abandonment of the INF is a grave watershed move towards nuclear war.

The way out of this heinous dilemma is not only maintaining the INF Treaty. Furthermore, there should a wholesale scaling back of NATO forces in Europe on Russia’s Western, Northern and Southern flanks. Just this month, NATO is holding its biggest-ever war maneuvers since the Cold War in the Arctic region on Russia’s border with 50,000 troops, accompanied by a flurry of surveillance flights over Russia’s coast.

The insanity of America’s death wish for nuclear war has to stop. The American ruling class won’t stop it because their death wish mentality is so suffused with blind arrogance and ignorance and it is so integral with the “normal” functioning of their capitalist military-industrial complex.

Russia is holding the line with its undoubted military capability and its principled diplomatic prudence. But it is time for the Europeans to step up to the plate and to exert some sense on the Americans.

For a start, the EU states should tell Trump that any plan to re-install medium-range nuclear weapons on their soil is impermissible.

Secondly, the Europeans need to scale back the NATO expansion towards Russian territory.

Thirdly, they need to tell Washington that Russia is a partner, not a pariah to be abused for the benefit of American militarism and hegemonic ambitions.

Will the Europeans do that? Their leaders may not have the backbone, but the citizens of Europe will have to, if they want to prevent their American “ally” inciting a nuclear cataclysm. American arrogance is fomenting a European rebellion against its death-wish criminal leaders.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50515.htm

When America Was Great, Savage White Un-Settlers Raped a Continent and Assaulted a Planet

Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings…are…a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

– Frederick Douglass, July 4th, 1852

“Together,” Donald “Make America Great Again” Trump told U.S. Naval Academy graduates last May, “there is nothing Americans can’t do, absolutely nothing. In recent years, and even decades,” Trump added, “too many people have forgotten that truth. They’ve forgotten that our ancestors trounced an empire, tamed a continent, and triumphed over the worst evils in history.”

I was reminded of Trump’s statement recently as I reflected on the remarkable record of climate-change driven extreme weather events that have hit the United States in recent years. Epic wild-fires, droughts, rains, floods, tornadoes, snowfalls, and hurricanes are humbling U.S.-America. They are only a foretaste of the stern continental taming U.S.-Americans can expect at the hands of Mother Nature in coming years. (More on that below.)

Where was one to begin in processing the untruth and affront embedded in Trump’s reflection on how “America” was once “great”?

“Our ancestors”? I have a paternal grandfather who may have been descended from original 18th or even 17th century Scotch-Irish immigrants to North America, but my largest ethnic strain is Finnish, thanks to the Luhtala family’s “chain migration” to DeKalb, Illinois in the early 20th century, long after the closing of the western U.S. frontier. (The Luhtalas worked in barbed-wire plants to help the continent’s capitalist “tamers”/takers mark their territorial conquests off as private property.) Like hundreds of millions of other U.S-Americans, I have ancestors who came long after the nation’s original white and mostly English, Irish, and German “settlers.” (Currently, 14% of the U.S. population is foreign-born, the largest percentage since 1910, right after my Finnish great-grandparents arrived, when 15% of US-Americans were born in other countries.)

These “ancestors…trounced an empire”? Not really. The U.S. merely broke off from the Western edge of the British Empire, which would go on to rule the world like no global hegemon until the post-World War II Pax Americana (more on that lovely formation below). The British Empire had a pretty damn good run from the end of the Napoleonic Wars through the rest of the 19thcentury.

For what it’s worth, the propertied masters atop the so-called American Revolution understood their new slave-owning republic as an empire – an “empire of liberty,” they called it, with no sense of irony given their dedication to the ruthless ethnic cleansing (to use a 20th century phrase) of the nation’s original inhabits and the expansion of Black chattel slavery.

“Tamed a continent”? Leaving aside the fact that Canada and Mexico also hold much of the North America, Trump’s phrase was an insolent slight of the continent’s original inhabitants. Here the president channeled the original “settlers” concept of the 10-18 million human beings who lived in North America prior to white-European invasion as pre-historic “savages” who required the stern hand of the “civilized” white man to impose order.

It was Orwellian twaddle and truth inversion. The continent’s First Nations people were highly civilized, unscathed by class rule, and harmoniously connected to the natural environment in ways that hold critical significance for human and other living things in our current age of capitalist ecocide, As the Native American author and activist Ward Churchill wrote more than two decades ago:

“On…the day Christopher Columbus first washed up on a Caribbean beach, North America was long since endowed with an abundant and exceedingly complex cluster of civilizations. Having continuously occupied the continent for at least 50,000 years, the native inhabitants evidenced a total population of perhaps 15 million, cities as large as the 40,000-resident urban center at Cahokia (in present-day Illinois), highly advanced conceptions of architecture and engineering, spiritual traditions embodying equivalents to modern eco-science, refined knowledge of pharmacology and holistic medicine, and highly sophisticated systems of governance, trade, and diplomacy. The traditional economies of the continent were …based in environmentally sound farming procedures which originated well over half the vegetal foodstuffs now consumed by peoples the world over. By and large, the indigenous societies demonstrating such attainments were organized along extremely egalitarian lines, with real property held collectively and matrifocality a normative standard.”

Pre-Conquest North America contained “large-scale societies which had perfected ways of organizing themselves into psychologically fulfilling wholes, experiencing very high standards of living, and still maintaining environmental harmony…War, in the Euro-derived sense in which the term is understood today” – as highly organized mass annihilation – “was,” Churchill noted, “unknown” among and between the First Nations.

Also unknown in the continent’s original civilizations was economic inequality and poverty on anything remotely like the scale of early modern Europe. The Old World was home to a capitalist order whose relentless enclosure of the European commons and destruction of independent farmer and artisan livelihoods generated a surplus population desperate to spill onto North America. Now the U.S. itself hosts savage inequalities – the top tenth of the nation’s One Percent owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent and its richest three persons have as much net worth between as the bottom half – that make Western Europe (incubator of modern class rule) look egalitarian.

Tamed a continent? It was more like raped a continent.The “Indians” (absurdly so misnamed because the “settlers” mistakenly thought they had discovered “the Indes”) were seen by “Predator” – Churchill’s understandable (from an indigenist perspective) term for the European invaders – as animalized brutes fit for elimination and removal even as the newcomers incorporated numerous aspects of Native American culture (moccasins, canoes, and more). A lethal combination of germs, superior numbers, technology, and killing capacities – including the moral capacity to wipe out whole villages with no more spiritual discomfort than that involved in shooting deer and coyotes – inflicted astonishing population decline on Native North America. One after another, original North American nations and tribes were liquidated and dispersed. “By 1890,” Churchill noted, “fewer than 250,000 Indians remained alive within the United States, a degree of decimation extending into the upper ninetieth percentile.”

Predator’s massacre chain ran from Connecticut Captain John Mason’s burning and shooting of hundreds of Pequot villagers near Mystic River in May of 1637 through terrible events like the so-called Battle (massacre) of Bad Axe (1832) and the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) to the Wounded Knee bloodbath (the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee) in December of 1891, when the U.S. Calvary killed 150-300 Lakota men, women, and children on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The United States’ beloved first president, George Washington, was known to the Iroquois as “Town Destroyer.”

In a popular first-person account of the “battle of Bad Axe” – the gruesome culmination of the brutal removal of the Sauk nation from northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin in the “Black Hawk War” [1] – U.S. Army Major John Allen Wakefield offered some remarkable reflections. “It was a horrid sight,” Wakefield wrote, “to witness little [Native American] children, wounded and suffering the most excruciating pain, although they were of the savage enemy, and the common enemy of the country…It was enough to make the heart of the most hardened being on earth to ache” But, Wakefield wrote, “I must confess, that it filled my heart with gratitude and joy, to think that I had been instrumental, with many others, indelivering my country of those merciless savages, and restoring those [invading white] people again to their peaceful homes and firesides” – on land that had for centuries hosted homes and firesides for the Sauk.

Such sentiments were common among the genocidal white killers across the centuries of North American “settlement” and ethnic cleansing. From the colonial era on, the savage “settlers” reveled in the mass slaying of indigenous people (including women, children, and older men) they saw as inherently “evil” and (curiously enough) “savage.” “Our Great Father,” a government agent told the Sauks, “will forbear no longer. He has tried to reclaim [Native Americans] and they grow worse. He is resolved to sweep them from the face of the earth. … If they cannot be made good they must be killed.”

This kind of truth-inverting narrative, depicting the continent’s peaceful original inhabitants and not their coldblooded butchers as the “merciless savages,” was typical of how the invading white un-“settlers” justified their genocidal extermination of North America’s first civilizations.

During the late 18thcentury and early 19th century, the Native North American Holocaust was meant among other things to clear the way for another kind of Holocaust – the sadistic forced labor and torture regime of Black chattel slavery, the key to the United States’ emergence as a major capitalist power by the mid-19thcentury. As the United States moved into the railroad and industrial era, its rising accumulation of capital fueled above by lucrative, highly profitable southern cotton slavery, the great Black ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass – the truly great American who Trump seemed last year to see as a living contemporarypersonality (a rapper like his good friend Kanye West, perhaps) – asked “what, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” His answer:

“a day that reveals to him…the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings…mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour….Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

The two and a half century Holocaust of Black chattel slavery is the persistently unacknowledged and uncompensated historical taproot of a stark Black-white inequality and hyper-segregation that continues to haunt “American” life and feed the nation’s gigantic, historically unmatched system of mass incarceration. The southern Confederacy, whose noxious historical monuments Trump and other white nationalists defend in the name of “history,” treasonously seceded from the Union and forced the Civil War for one clear reason: the southern slave-owning ruling class’s determination that the election of Abraham Lincoln spelled the end of the racist chattel system.

It wasn’t just human beings that the white “settlers” “tamed” – raped, that is – when “America” was “Great.” Between European “settlement” and the aftermath of the Civil War, Predator saw fit to fell 52% of the deciduous U.S. forest east of the Mississippi. A fifth of that remaining woodland bit the dust between 1850 and 1909, thanks to accelerating waves of deforestation led by agricultural clearing and logging in the Great Lakes region and the South (where Black cotton slavery was largely reconstituted in new forms in the last third of the nineteenth century).

Then there was the decline of original wildlife, not so much “tamed” as exterminated. “As the 19th century progressed,” the National Park Service reports:

“wildlife habitat was dramatically reduced by deforestation and wetland filling, combined with over-hunting. New markets for wildlife made killing wildlife a financially profitable venture for hunters, who took advantage of improved transportation methods like railroads to gain access to previously inaccessible areas. The lack of legal protection for wildlife led to the slaughter of many species, some of which were hunted to extinction or near extinction.Wildlife like passenger pigeons and buffalo, which had been extremely abundant, were hunted to extinction(or nearly so). Migratory birds were especially impacted, since there was a huge market for the feathers of birds such as egrets, used to create women’s fashionable hats” (emphasis added).

The elimination of the continent’s once great bison herds was nauseating exterminism. Richard Dodge, an army officer, reported in 1877 that “Buffalo were slaughtered without sense or discretion…Where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with sickening stench, and the vast plain, and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”

Soon the meat barons of Chicago would devise ways to “tame” – to kill and process on a previously unimaginable scale that brought droves of tourists from around the world to marvel at the modern art and science of animal slaughter – many thousands of cows, pigs, and sheep per day in the giant meatpacking plants of Upton Sinclair’s famously sickening “Jungle.” The harrowing and alienating work carried out in these and other vast new mass production workplaces across the nation showed that antebellum and Civil War era labor activists were right to remind Americans that slavery took a waged form as well as a chattel form – and that antidemocratic class rule was not limited to the slavery of the U.S. South and the serfdom of Russia.

As mostly white U.S. workers rose against their ruthless exploitation under the rule of “wage slavery” in the rapidly expanding new industrial capitalism of the post-Civil War, the capitalist press not uncommonly justified the bloody repression of striking and marching proletarians and killing of their radical leaders by describing them as “white savages.” As the labor historian James Green noted in his classic study Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and a Bombing That Divided America:

“Many [U.S.] editorialists relied on animal metaphors to describe the anarchists, whom they branded ‘ungrateful hyenas,’ ‘incendiary vermin,’ and ‘slavic wolves.’…the alien incendiaries were often compared to other hated groups like the menacing Apache Indians. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat applied an old frontier adage about ‘savage’ tribes to the new menace. ‘There are no good anarchists except dead anarchists,’ it proclaimed.”

When railroad workers went out on strike in Chicago, U.S. infantry troops were summoned fresh from Dakotas campaigns against the Sioux to kills dozens of working-class men and boys – “white savages” – on the city’s Southwest side.

“Our ancestors,” Trump said, “triumphed over the worst evils in history”(Trump)? What, like racialized genocide and chattel slavery, the elimination of species, the rampant destruction of natural habitat, the rise of Robber Baron plutocracy, and concentrated wage-slavery on a scale that Karl Marx could barely have imagined? The “taming of the continent” by “our” great gun- and bullwhip-wielding “ancestors” were great triumphs for all of these and terrible historical scourges.

But, of course, the last clause of the final Trump sentence I quoted at the beginning of this essay refers to the 20thcentury. By “worst evils in history,” Orange (Truth-) Crush(er) meant German fascism/Nazism and Soviet “communism.” And here there are at least five problems.

First, the United States’ interwar establishment was fairly pleased with European fascism until the Third Reich and its Japanese partner threatened to shut off the world system to America’s rising global economic power. U.S. business class “elites” saw fascism as a welcome disciplining force to crush European trade unions and Leftists and as a bulwark against socialist state in Russia.

Second, Hitler and his fellow Nazi leaders drew considerable inspiration from how the white “settler” U.S. had “tamed” its “inferior races” with genocide, ethnic cleansing, and brutal, fascist-like racial terrorism, segregation, and disenfranchisement. The United States’ Indian reservations and Jim Crow South were Social Darwinian role models for the social policy architects of the Third Reich.

Third, it was the Soviet Union by far and away that defeated the supreme evil that was the Nazi regime, at the cost of 25 million dead (the United States lost just 277,000 people in Europe and North Africa during World War II).

Fourth, for all its considerable flaws, the authoritarian, bureaucratic-collectivist USSR developed a modern and urbanized society with health care and education for all and outside and against the savagely unequal and egoistic, accumulation-mad world capitalist system headquartered in London and New York. Washington DC. (The U.S.-forced collapse of the Soviet Union and empire led to drastic reductions in the quality of life in Russia and Eastern Europe.)

Fifth, after it joined with USSR in the defeat of German, Italian, and Japanese fascism, the new global Pax Americana expanded upon its earlier history of genocide and slavery to become, well, one of “the worst evils in world history.”

“The problem after a war,” wrote the pacifist A.J. Muste in 1941, “is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?”

Consistent with Muste’s warning, victorious and relatively unscathed “America” – the only, global-reach Superpower after the “suicide of Europe” and the Nazis’ devastation of much of Russia – went on a global rampage after “winning” World War II (during which time U.S. imperial policymakers planned to make sure that Washington finally displaced the United Kingdom as global hegemon after the unprecedented carnage ceased). The planetary death toll resulting from the high-powered aggression of the U.S. and its allies and proxies since 1945 runs well into the millions. Along the way, the U.S. has: overthrown many dozens of governments (including democratically elected ones); funded, equipped trained and provided political cover for a host of U.S.-allied “Third World fascist” regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; subverted and pre-empted democracy across the planet; interfered in the internal political affairs of nearly every nation on Earth; spread its military installations into more than 100 “sovereign” states; led the world into a permanent arms race humanity can ill-afford; developed the capacity to blow the world up many times over.

Consistent with its founding genocidal elimination of original North American civilizations that anticipated “modern eco-science” and “maintain[ed] environmental harmony” (Churchill), the United States has also spearheaded the planetary expansion of a rapaciously eco-cideal world capitalist order that has set humanity on course for final environmental catastrophe: the Greenhouse Gassing to Death of Life on Earth, a crime that makes the Nazis look like small-time crooks.

It’s not for nothing that the world’s population has long ranked the U.S. as the leading threat to and on Earth.

Who will tame the United States? With all due respect for those people and forces that have worked to undermine over many years, the final cards are held by the very Earth that so many U.S.-Americans have been falsely led to believe they could conquer. Nature bats last. The record-setting extreme weather that has hit the U.S. (“America”) in recent years are only early bases-on-balls compared to the late-inning World Series grand-slams Mother Nature is going to pulverize “America” and the world with in coming years. The real existential shit hits the fan when we can no longer grow, hunt, and fish enough food, find enough clean water, adequately cool our bodies, and fend off pandemics.

The socio-pathological climate-denier Trump is doing his eco-cidal best to speed that existential moment along. One example among many: but for the opposition of more level-headed operatives in his administration, he would have by now signed an executive order absurdly citing national security concerns as an excuse for forcing regional U.S. electric grid operators to continue purchasing power from coal-burning and nuclear-powered plants that have outlived their normal operational lifespans! What does a malignant, eco-fascistic narcissist like Trump care if the human race joins the anthropogenic Sixth Great Extinction after his death takes its toll and he learns that all the money he stole can never buy back his soul. (to paraphrase Bob Dylan)?

“America’s” old, rich, and white masters (Trump is just one of many) – our parasitic “tamers” and takers– think they can pull up the drawbridges to restrict the coming environmental apocalypse to the poor and nonwhite global South and save the dwindling supply of life’s necessities and luxuries for themselves and their families in heavily guarded and automated compounds. But it doesn’t work that way. They can preserve themselves a bit longer than most, but the “No Planet B” (as the environmentalists say) they can run to after they’ve finally made the planet completely and finally uninhabitable even for the privileged and ecocidal Few. No U.S.-Americans, not even the richest and most powerful ones, can hop planets and galaxies like the Earth-colonizing and Earth-warming aliens who rule America in John Carpenter’s classic left science fiction movie They Live! Even they will be tamed to the point of erasure. As Earth is our witness, the laws of nature always win out in the end. The continent’s original inhabitants knew that. The Holocaust they met in the name of “progress” was not progress.

Endnote

1) The 1832 “Black Hawk War” was a one-sided affair, typical of the many pitiless mass exterminations committed by supposedly noble “settlers” seeking to “tame the continent.” As penalty for the warrior Black Hawk and his followers’ determination to reclaim rich tribal lands brazenly occupied by whites in northern Illinois, the Sauk and Fox Indians lost 600 people, including hundreds of woman and children. Just 70 soldiers and “settlers” lost their lives. The conflict culminated in the so-called Battle of Bad Axe, on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River, near the present-day community of Victory in southwest Wisconsin. Better described as a massacre than a “battle,” this American military triumph involved U.S. General Henry Atkinson killing every Indian who tried to run for cover or to flee across the Mississippi River. On August 1, 1832, Black Hawk’s band reached the Mississippi at its confluence with the Bad Axe River. What followed was an atrocity, committed despite the Indians’ repeated attempts at surrender. “While the Sauk refugees were preparing rafts and canoes, the armed [U.S.] steamboat Warrior arrived,” historian Kerry Trask recounts, “whereupon Black Hawk tried to negotiate with its troops under a flag of truce. The Americans opened fire, killing twenty-three warriors.”

“As we neared them,” one US officer who “served” in the U.S. assault recalled, “they raised a white flag and endeavored to decoy us, but we were a little too old for them.”

Hundreds of Sauk and Fox men, women and children were shot, clubbed, and bayoneted to death on August 2nd. “US soldiers scalped most of the dead. They cut long strips of flesh from dead and wounded Indians for use as razor strops.” The slaughter was supported by cannon and rifle fire from the aptly named Warrior, which picked off tribal members swimming for their lives.

By Major Wakefield’s account, the US troops at Bad Axe “shrank not from their duty. They all joined in the work of death for death it was. We were by this time fast getting rid of those demons in human shape… the Ruler of the Universe, He who takes vengeance on the guilty, did not design those guilty wretches to escape His vengeance…”

The top “demon in human shape” – the old Sauk warrior Black Hawk – lived six years beyond the “war” that bore his name. He was sent to a US reservation in Iowa after US President Andrew Jackson – a Trump favorite and himself a prolific Indian-killer – had Black Hawk paraded as celebrity war booty – as an exotic “savage” and proof of the United States’ military’s alleged great prowess in defeating such barbarian brutes – before gawking crowds in eastern US cities.

At Chicago’s United Center at least 41 times each National Hockey League season, more than 10,000 U.S. whites wear jerseys emblazoned with a caricature-like profile image of “chief” Black Hawk, whose people were obliterated and dispersed so that northern Illinois’s fertile fields and pastures could be turned into the private property of white farmers, merchants, and industrialists. Oh, but for the return of the days when America was great!

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https://theintercept.com/2018/10/25/roger-waters-marielle-franco-and-the-power-of-inspiration-in-the-face-of-darkness-and-danger/

Roger Waters, Marielle Franco, and the Power of Inspiration in the Face of Darkness and Danger

Last night was emotional and moving in so many ways and it occurred, of all places, at an outdoor Roger Waters stadium concert in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: four days before this large, beautiful and struggling country, out of desperation, fear and anger, is likely to elect a genuinely menacing monster, and empower his movement in ways that were unthinkable until very recently.

Seven months ago, in the days following the brutal and devastating political assassination of our close friend Marielle Franco, The Independent asked me to write a tribute and an obituary. My first reaction was not to do it because the emotions were still way too raw and that kind of personal, intimate writing isn’t what I feel comfortable doing, especially in a moment as vulnerable and difficult as that.

But then I saw it as an opportunity to process my emotions about Marielle through what I know best and what she was most – writing about political battles and causes and figures of defiance and dissent – and to try to viscerally convey to a foreign audience what made her such a singular force of inspiration. So I wrote a 1,000-word article that was half obituary and half personal reflection.

Unbeknownst to me, that article was published not only online but also in the paper’s print edition (I often forget print editions of anything exist). Roger Waters was in London on that day and happened to read it in the paper and was so moved by Marielle’s story that he cut the article out of the paper with scissors, folded it up, and put in his wallet. He told me earlier this week that he’s carried it around with him every day since, thinking about Marielle and reflecting on what her life, and death, meant.

Over the last three weeks, Waters has been touring Brazil, to sold-out massive stadiums, and using his platform for political statements at a time and place where that is needed more than ever. His denunciation of the rise of fascism in the form of Jair Bolsonaro at his first concert provoked boos and cancelled ticket sales, but he’s only escalated his political crusading since: not the cheap and superficial caricature of celebrity political statements but a deeply informed, compassionate and sophisticated messaging campaign that merges art and humanitarianism (not surprising for someone who has risked, and lost, so much from his enduring and relentless defense of Palestinians).

Last night, in Rio de Janeiro, he invited us to the show along with Marielle’s family – her 19-year-old daughter, Luyara Santos, her sister Anielle, and her widow Mônica Benício. He pulled my article from his wallet, talked about it and put a huge image of it on the screen, and then had the three of them on the stage to pay tribute to Marielle.

Fifteen minutes before that, Mônica was in tears with fear about going up, but once she got up there, they owned the stage, leading defiant chants demanding justice for Marielle and denouncing the fascism the country is on the brink of embracing. Mônica gave Waters a shirt that read “Lute Como Marielle Franco” (“Fight Like Marielle Franco”), which he put on and wore for the rest of the show (see above photo).

It was an incredibly powerful and poignant moment at a dark and grim time for Brazil. Waters said he regards Marielle as “the real leader of Brazil” – meaning the values that she represents are what can lead Brazil out of the heinous path it’s about to embark on. He also paid tribute to the black, favela-originating women who worked in Marielle’s cabinet and who – after her assassination – declared that they would not hide in fear but run for public office. They all just won their races two weeks ago, as did one of Marielle’s best friends, elected to the federal Congress.

The country’s leading newspapers headlined this moment – the homage Roger Waters paid to Marielle – and it was a reminder of the power to inspire and find light even in the grimest and darkest times.

It was also a personal reminder for me of a lesson that, for so many reasons, is tempting to forget or ignore but should always be embraced. You never know the effects your actions will have on someone: even just a single individual, and the way that can ripple into the world.

I had no idea when I was writing in obscurity for a tiny audience on my personal blog 12 years ago and then at Salon that a young kid named Edward Snowden would be reading it and forming his thoughts about the world in part by interacting with it. I never thought that my highly personal and painful reflection on Marielle would touch someone across the world who has a uniquely powerful artistic platform – who had never previously heard of Marielle – and would be in Brazil at exactly the moment the country most needs the energy and humanity he brings.

With Mônica Benício after her appearance with Roger Waters

I know for certain that Mônica Benício, growing up in the sprawling slum of Maré and overcoming every conceivable obstacle to fulfill her dream of becoming an architect, with a dissertation on how the physical structures of Rio’s favelas are both psychologically and politically repressive – never imagined that she would be forced into a political spotlight as a crusader and activist, and become a crucial symbol of defiant strength and courage at a time when millions of people were reeling in fear and hopelessness after the assassination of her wife.

And I strongly doubt that Marielle – as she was growing up in Maré, as she became a single mother at the age of 19, as she confronted the most powerful, violent and corrupt factions in Brazil, as she took buses two hours across across Rio to try to provide aid to families whose innocent children were killed by police officers and to the grieving mothers of police officers killed by violent gangs, and even as she was elected to Rio de Janeiro’s City Council in 2016 with a shockingly huge vote total – ever contemplated that she would become a worldwide icon and an inspiration to so many people to embrace courage and dissent on behalf of those most marginalized and powerless rather than capitulate to fear and intimidation.

Powerful factions, as part of their intimidation tactics, deliberately try to breed a sense of collective and personal impotence: you’re too small and powerless, and they’re too fortified and entrenched, for you to meaningfully challenge them. But human beings, all of us, have the power to move the world even a little tiny bit at a time. And the more that happens, the more the world moves in the direction it’s pushed.

We’re trained to think only grandiose, revolutionary overhauls have meaning. But tiny, isolated actions also matter – convincing a single person to change how they think or behave, helping or saving a single life, being an anonymous, unrecognized part of any campaign or movement. It matters on its own because of its inherent worth, and because of its cumulative effect. But so often your actions can reverberate in ways you would never expect. Impotence and hopelessness are a tactic, a lie told by those who wield power, to foster resignation, passivity, and acceptance.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49955.htm

Erratic Empire Down-falling

Everybody understands the importance of the dollar system as the Achilles heel for the US empire yet oddly, when analyzing imperial action of Warshington of the last decades, the focus is usually on ideologies like Zionism or American exceptionalism, or on at most partial aspects such as fossil fuels and pipelines. Another focus, favored mainly among Americans, is that America once was great but now has lost track somehow. I still think that the means of production, or in case of the US selling dollar annotated debt masked as investment, is far more paramount for US decision-making than ideology or oil, and that America hadn’t lost track but instead desperately tries to hold on to its track.

First, a few words about America’s track. The imperialists of the US regime desperately cling to their empire, that’s a classic, that’s what imperialists do. The Nazis clung to their short-lived empire until Germany was in ruins, the Romans clung to theirs until defeated, and the British struggle during WW2 was far more about preserving theirs than it was about defeating Nazi Germany. Empires usually don’t dismantle themselves. But it’s also the American people, serfs to the empire, who are desperately clinging. That’s what I found so appalling about the Occupy movement. These millennial brats had no political agenda but to demand their cheap flat screens back from the banksters. They didn’t want change, they wanted continuity. The same is true for the so-called “alt-right” movement who have zero political agenda for a better future. They lament the present while dreaming of a past 1950s/1960s America that has never even really existed. When they say America has lost its track, they might have Middle Eastern wars in mind, but that’s rubbish because there is nothing new or different in these wars than in any wars Warshington had fought before against the Natives, their own Southern brethren, Mexico, Spain, Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, you name it, and the meddling on Maidan is in no way different to what they’ve been doing in Latin American countries since the mid 19th century. Psychologically, I think, what they mourn is that the mask has fallen off and that they cannot go back to that cozy, simple, and ignorant lifestyle they had been able to enjoy up until 9/11.

To me the US empire is an historic aberration of humanity. With its genesis, its unparalleled level of violence, the categorically insolidary and segregated society and surreal consumer culture it has created, and the delusional ideology and mythology with which it justifies itself based on a borderline psychotic Messiah complex (Manifest Destiny), it represents an exceptional oddity among nations. But beyond its mental problems there is a cold, hard fact – at least within the realm of capitalism – that explains the actions and reactions of US imperialism throughout the years, especially in recent decades. It is both fuel and failure of the empire: the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, or rather the system behind it which consists of masquerading and selling debt as investment.

Many people consider the US to be a proper republic with a valid constitution, separation of powers, rule of law and all that jazz. I think that is baloney. In truth the US government is a front for a criminal enterprise and it has been like that ever since the US Constitution has been created and passed by whom Gore Vidal rightfully dubbed as “frightened men of property”. While the American Revolution in itself was a truly unique and valuable moment in human history, the system that resulted from it was and still is designed by men of wealth for men of wealth to obtain as much wealth as possible at the expense of everybody else without the tedious social responsibilities the French republicans came up with. In fact, this lack of social responsibility is what they mean when they say freedom. The American nation never had a chance to develop to its potential, because it was hijacked early on by networks/cartels of the rich. What is commonly referred to as the American dream should therefore rather be named the American deception. In my view, the Pursuit of Happiness is the largest middle-finger ever erected in human history. America has never lost its track, I think it has always been on the same track, yet it is about to derail hard.

While Europe has managed (more or less) to develop, kill and struggle itself into a bunch of societies in which solidarity, social justice and rule of law remain core cultural and social concepts – to a certain extent even for the rich (Napoleonic Code) -, America has developed into a rat race society based on property, materialism and a general save-your-own-ass mentality. A smart guy from New York once described his own country to me as money talks, bullshit walks. The fish rots or rather trickles down from the head. America is run by a bunch of mafia cartels no better than street gangs – Wall St, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Media, Military-Industrial-Complex etc. – with the Federal Reserve as their giant money laundering corporation, a bureaucracy of ridiculous proportions as both the mafia’s hitmen (CIA, Pentagon) and legal front (Congress), and the US president as the constantly changing promotion mascot. There is very often no love lost between these cartels or their players, but there are two things that unite them. First, the US dollar system, the single largest Ponzi scheme in human history and, second, an extremely elitist self-concept inherited from English aristocracy asserting that it is them, and only them, who shall rule the world. Take the infinite callousness and arrogance of the English upper class, offer them a vast country and endless influx of human material for exploitation and what you get is the United States of America and its WASP regime. The US has been an imperialist project right from the start, because it was founded out of (British) imperialism.

From their elitist perspective the American or any other people serve as human cattle to be duped, exploited and used. It is the ultimate Fordist nightmare, which Aldous Huxley could only vaguely anticipate in his novel A Brave New World. The people are made to live under conditions comparable to that of farm cattle with TV screens flickering in their stables. To the regime they are nothing but salary and consume cattle, cynically dubbed as human resources in the business world, a euphemism for slaves if you ask me. Lives, thoughts and views, food, medicine and drug use, culture, or the fairy tale people are supposed to believe as history are determined and conditioned by a gigantic propaganda industry that makes Joseph Goebbels drool in his coffin. Hollywood is the manifestation of what he could only dream of.

Europeans suffer from pretty much the same state of shallow and philistine slave existence, but it’s mostly a post-WW2 imported American thing for us. We still have a choice and we have all the necessary cultural, nutritional and intellectual roots to free ourselves from it. I might be dead wrong in my observations, but I don’t see how Americans with what I consider as their still prevalent settler mentality could really do that. I hope they will find a way and if only after the collapse of the empire. Regardless, you cannot properly understand US imperialism, let alone the so-called “West” in general, unless you fully appreciate the manufactured fake that it really is. Therefore let’s start with the only real thing about it – at least in a capitalist sense – the dollar system.

Empire of Snakes and Weasels

Through their dubious actions and policies of supporting all sides before and during WW2 the US cartels managed to weasel their host country’s way from the world’s number one debtor before the war to the world’s number one creditor after the war. With this leverage at their disposal the US entered the Bretton Woods negotiations in 1944. The Bretton Woods conference was in essence the result of Anglo-American establishments contemplating on how to rule and dominate the world after WW2. British imperialists, the other oddballs of human history and well worth an article of their own, and America’s ruling cartels had already united their criminal enterprises, although from different perspectives. While the British were mostly interested in using American muscle to preserve their empire which had been struggling especially against Germany’s rising economic power since the late 19th century, the American cartels were eager to establish themselves on a global and especially European stage, an endeavor for which Britain served well as springboard.

It is therefore no surprise that the English speaking imperialists on both sides of the Pond had different views on how to run future currency-based world domination. England was represented by British economist John Maynard Keynes – himself one of the initiators of the Bretton Woods conference – who put forward the idea of an international bank called International Clearing Union which would issue its own currency – the bancor – as an account currency between nations. The idea was to have trade surplus or creditor nations invest in the economies of trade deficit or debtor nations and so to even out global economic imbalances. Lord Keynes was one of the few if not the only competent of capitalist economists.

Keynes proposed that any country racking up a large trade deficit (equating to more than half of its bancor overdraft allowance) would be charged interest on its account. It would also be obliged to reduce the value of its currency and to prevent the export of capital. But – and this was the key to his system – he insisted that the nations with a trade surplus would be subject to similar pressures. Any country with a bancor credit balance that was more than half the size of its overdraft facility would be charged interest, at a rate of 10%. It would also be obliged to increase the value of its currency and to permit the export of capital. If, by the end of the year, its credit balance exceeded the total value of its permitted overdraft, the surplus would be confiscated. The nations with a surplus would have a powerful incentive to get rid of it. In doing so, they would automatically clear other nations’ deficits. (source)

This is – within the realm of capitalism – a pretty neat idea, one that would have, for example, prevented the flaws of the euro system, in which the common currency is undervalued for Germany (great for exports, pretty shit for the domestic market) but overvalued for pretty much everyone else with the result of German industry and its retailers Lidl and Aldi literally eating up the rest of Europe. Had the euro been designed as a common account currency with a proper multilateral treaty based on Keynes’s ideas while preserving national currencies, we wouldn’t have had to experience the euro crisis with all its terrible humanitarian consequences, and Germany would not have had the chance to abuse its imperialist power within Europe the way it did. I don’t think that the crappy euro design was a mistake but rather one deliberately made by German bankers and industrialists who prevailed over French and others when drafting the euro – but that’s something others have already written extensively and are more skilled about. The same flaws we can see in the euro system persist in the dollar system on a global scale since Bretton Woods, when one country can dominate the rest using the leverage of currency.

In the beginning of the conference everyone was with the ideas of Lord Keynes for they were as reasonable as it can get within a capitalist frame. But it was the American imperialists, represented by Harry Dexter White, who had quite different ideas for their currency-based world domination. They wanted to seize the opportunity by establishing an International Stabilization Fund which would put the whole burden of economic imbalance on the debtor nations. Instead of a global account currency like the bancor they wanted to establish their own US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It is not documented how many arms the US cartels had to twist in how many directions at Bretton Woods, but eventually they prevailed and the notorious Bretton Woods system with the US dollar as sole reserve currency was implemented with the infamous IMF at its core, an institution that evidently turns everything it touches into deep shit as it keeps working along utmost economic illiteracy – even for capitalists – designed only to withdraw further capital from already troubled nations.

Having one country’s currency as the world’s sole reserve currency was and is so far unique in history. It is often and commonly believed that the US dollar had just replaced the British pound as the world’s reserve currency, but this is not quite accurate. British pound, German mark, French franc or Portuguese escudo had at their respective times always been reserve currencies alongside each other. Some were more regionally focused, like the French franc in Africa, with the British pound playing the major but not singular role globally. Bretton Woods, however, introduced the US dollar as the world’s or rather capitalist world’s sole reserve currency with all other currencies having fixed exchange rates to it. The US cartels gained tremendous political and economic clout by that, especially since it later allowed them to run a much larger and longer state and trade deficit than they could have, had the dollar been just been one garden variety currency among others. But how did it go and what does it mean today, when the world appears to be returning to a “normal” state of affairs again with the rise of euro and yuan?

A Roller Coaster That Only Goes Downhill

Many of America’s grumpy nostalgia who thought that a billionaire with a terrible hairdo would help them out of their misery by building a wall consider America to have been great in the past. Of course, it was never great at all. Those were times of heinous crimes against humanity by the US regime against the world and its own people, earlier even inspiring other villains. On principle it was just like today and how it has always been. The USAF was carpet bombing Asian countries and everybody was scared of Russians. Still, the times felt great, because the country was surfing the big post-war Kondratieff wave and enjoyed a Brave New World of Fordist pleasure based on hard work and hedonistic obedience to advertisement. Milkshakes tasted sweet, Rock’n’Roll pounded loud, and Cadillacs rolled big. Universities were negro-free and retards were sterilized. America was great and Jesus in love with you. The share of household consumption to GDP was already around 60%, but that wasn’t a problem because most of what Americans consumed was also made in America by Americans. But then the wave turned into swash and started lapping against the shore of reality. The markets were saturated. Everyone had a fridge and one or two cars and TVs by then. No new major technological innovation for further consumer goods lurked around the corner to drive the economy. The Kondratieff wave backwashed. Capitalism had once again reached its regular growth limits and the usual meltdown was looming. Voracious for more profits corporations started the big outsourcing frenzy in the 1970s to get their fix by having to share less with their workers in exchange for cheaper products from cheaper countries. Now, outsourcing as such is not a problem if the CEOs know what they’re doing and have a long-term strategy such as using profits generated from saving to invest in research for new innovation, for example. The problem is that the US is for the most part a shareholder economy and CEOs and their corporations are legally obliged to provide profits for them. I am talking about short-term quarterly or yearly profits, not profits for long-term visions. Even if the odd business school graduate working as CEO has a long-term vision, the American cartel model of economy won’t allow him or her to implement it without providing for shareholder profits first. Keep that in mind when you wonder where US industry went compared to German industry, apparently a core part of Trumpish penis envy triggering infantile feelings of unfair.

Over the course of the 1970s to the 1990s American workers increasingly turned into burger flippers, janitors and cashiers, while Mexicans, Filipinos and Chinese started to increasingly sweat in their shops. The purchasing power of American consumers declined and that threatened the colossal GDP. Reaganomics didn’t trickle down at all, but it made sure that lumberjack shirts presented something non-existent, and banks and corporations got another decade-long profit fix. By the late 1990s, it became obvious that to keep the machine running Americans had to have their credit cards loaded and their stock markets bloated. Therefore, Bill “Never-Inhaled-and-Didn’t Have-Sex” Clinton deregulated the banks so that they could provide Americans with cheap mortgage credits for their consumerist pleasure. Advertisement went on hyperdrive to make Americans buy junk and surban sprawl. Another profit fix for banks and corporations for yet another decade had been conjured up. GDP and plebeian excitement were saved for the day. The result of this policy was the much feared massive trade deficit, because economies in Europe, Asia and Latin America managed to replace American manufacturing globally either with their own products or simply by producing American ones.

In reality it is all a bit more complex, of course, but I’m deliberately keeping it simple to highlight America’s economic failure by design. It’s the sparkler among empires, having burnt so bright for three decades between 1945 and 1975 yet violently fizzling out ever since. What is important to understand at this point is that without Bretton Woods the US cartels would have never been able to run it this far, almost half a century on debt and delusions by now, because even when Nixon ditched the gold standard to free the empire from its shackles to run mile-high deficits, the US dollar remained the world’s reserve currency, first, in lack of another major currency to challenge it, and, second, as a result of a dirty deal made with the Saudi Barbarians: you sell your oil only in US dollars and make the rest of OPEC follow suit and we build up your stone or rather sand aged country American style. Goats as the common garbage disposal system in Riyadh had been replaced by white trucks, skyscrapers built, American weapons bought, and US debt sold to European and Asian oil junkies. John Perkins described this dirty deal perfectly well in his Confessions of An Economic Hitman. With the petrodollar established this way the US cartels could continue their criminal enterprise and it is the only reason why the Saudis have come as close to US imperialism as airplanes into tall buildings.

The US cartels are dependent on the dollar as the world’s sole reserve currency to be able to run the deficits necessary to fuel their criminal enterprise of world domination. In order to do that they need other countries to hoard dollars in the form of US debt, which they will only do if they believe the US was a thriving economy. But since the 1980s the US cartels can hold up the illusion of presiding over an economic powerhouse pretty much only with plebeian consumption running on debt. Currently about 70% of the GDP is private household consumption which is nominally not much more than during America’s self-felt greatness, but it has now turned into the last, almost last engine rattling to keep if not America’s success at least its success story going. Virtually none of the consumed products are made in America anymore. Industry, engineering, and manufacturing went down the toilet and despite their constant attention whoring neither the narcissists in Hollywood nor Silicon Valley could make up for it. The only industry still pumping hard to inflate the GDP is the bogus financial sector and so the American economy hovers from one bubble to the next, each one inflated with the illusion of a working economy based on a bloated GDP. The question is: why is it so important for the US cartels to keep up a colossal GDP even at the cost of its own economic foundation and what does it have to do with US aggression all around the world, at least in the past two decades?

Welcome to the Dark Side

As the ever so astute American philosopher Homer Simpson once said, “People can come up with statistics to prove anything […]. Forty percent of all people know that.”, so I will toss some stats at you. Please bear with me. I chose to compare military spending, trade deficit, household consumption, household debt, government debt, and GDP – all numbers are in billion dollars.

Chart

Numbers are from the World Bank and United Nations and from this site.

The curves aren’t what is striking, they’re obvious, what strikes are the correlations between different data:
Correlation of: Military Spending Trade Balance Household Consumption Household Debt Government Debt GDP
Military Spending 1.00 0.22 0.83 0.89 0.78 0.82
Trade Balance 0.22 1.00 0.11 0.39 -0.12 0.12
Household Consumption 0.83 0.11 1.00 0.91 0.97 0.99
Household Debt 0.89 0.39 0.91 1.00 0.79 0.91
Government Debt 0.78 -0.12 0.97 0.79 1.00 0.96
GDP 0.82 0.12 0.99 0.91 0.96 1.00

I’ll just arrogantly assume that you know what correlation is. The important thing to note is that it’s about whether two data sets are related or not. The first thing that strikes the eye is that US trade deficit is hardly related to any other indicators, except perhaps for the relation to household debt. Therefore, the question arises if the Trump administration really is about trade deficit at all, as Mr Orange likes to claim, since it is mainly debt that cripples the country and shareholder values dependent on a high GDP that drive it. I don’t see Trump battling debt at all, but I modestly assume that there are at least one or maybe even two staffers in Warshington who read and analyse economic data.

The strongest correlation exists between household consumption, household debt, government debt and GDP. They are all above the 0.9 mark, even reaching almost full correlation between GDP and household consumption. In other words, the massive GDP of the US goes hand in hand with household consumption, which goes hand in hand with both private and public debt. The US appears to produce its GDP colossus mostly by investors buying dollar annotated debt. The irony – and eventually system failure – arises from the fact that the US cartels need to fake high economic productivity and reliability by financing high consumption of mostly imported goods on credit to show off a colossal GDP necessary to attract financial investors, both domestic and foreign, whose investments are then again used to finance aforementioned credits. This is what I call a vicious circle and kind of what I imagine to feel like hugging a pork half.

When we put military spending into the mix, the actions of US imperialism become even clearer. It correlates strongly or even very strongly to the other four indicators, yet military spending is hardly the cause of high public debt or GDP. After all, military spending amounts only to about 3.5% of GDP (not counting the totality of national security spending, let alone money made by CIA drug trafficking). Apparently, and in some magical way, US military action, or at least military spending, guarantees high consumption and thus a high GDP.

Bombing for Debt

It is a rather mundane insight, that what one wants and what one can do to get it are two different things. What the US cartels want is clear: Full World Domination (FWD), which even if they got it, would still be a system designed to fail as it cannot survive without a foe. Regardless, Brzezinski formulated it in 1997 in his pamphlet The Grand Chessboard, an American version of Uncle Adolf’s Mein Kampf. Like Mein Kampf was in many parts bootlegging Henry Ford’s The International Jew, Brzezinski hadn’t had one original thought either. His ideas were almost identical to those that British geo-strategist Halford Mackinder formulated as Geographical Pivot of History in 1904. This idea fix, never to let any land power take control in Eurasia or let any kind of Eurasian integration happen, seems to be engraved on the crazed minds of Anglo-American elites since the 19th century and is guideline to their politics ever since then. Germany and Russia had been and still are the main adversaries and targets, but also Iran and China. The whole history of the 20th century can only be understood under this premise. This, however, is not part of the official fairy tale that is bourgeois history. No wonder I didn’t learn about it at school. Anyway, it is also related to the preservation of the dollar system.

When the ever so humble Anglo-American crazies were convinced they had defeated the Soviet Union they started acting right away. The goal was to destroy any possible Silk Road and/or cooperation between the land powers of Germany, France, Russia, China, and Iran. Let me first briefly summarize the pre-millennial actions:

They nationally endowed democracy and Russophobia in what today has become the Idiot Belt (Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, Scandinavia) to shape a cordon sanitaire between Germany and Russia.
They literally ate up Russia economically during the 1990s and meddled with the aim to once and for all get rid of it as a power to reckon with.
They gave Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait in order to have a pretext to set foot in the Middle East – the first step against Iran after Saddam had screwed up the 1980s Gulf War.
They broke apart Yugoslavia, the last standing and just too large socialist country in Europe – this time with the help of Germany which had and still has its own imperial ambitions in Europe.
They bombed Serbia and sliced out Kosovo in order to establish a military base at the historical end of the Silk Road from China – first step in preventing Eurasian integration (and to control heroin trafficking to Europe as a sweet cherry on top).

So far, so good. But as I already mentioned, by the end of the millennium the dying horse of US economy had turned into a leaky horse-shaped balloon that needed to be constantly inflated with loans and foreign dollar investments, so that they now had to fight two fronts: inflate the balloon and conquer the world. At the same time the EU was about to establish the euro, the first currency able to challenge the dollar as the world’s sole reserve currency. They must have realized that time is running out. I assume this had let them to make an extremely filthy deal with the Zionists and Saudi Barbarians to demolish the World Trade Center in a staged terrorist attack to have political carte blanche for the next couple of years. The attack on Afghanistan was surely still part of the master plan to encircle Iran, Russia, and China, and to set foot in Central Asia, and thus to block the historical Silk Road at the Chinese end. It was crafted two months before 9/11 after all. However, the following actions became increasingly erratic and, I believe, they were in part deviating from the original plan. The aggression against Iraq, Iran and Libya, be it bombs or sanctions, all had a monetary background as well. Hussein announced already in 2000 that he wanted to price oil in euro, Iran announced in 2006 to open an oil bourse trading in euro, yuan, rial and rubel, and Libya wanted to introduce a gold backed currency, the dinar, as a joined currency for the African Union (which also heavily undermined French colonial interests in Africa). This can’t be a coincidence. These aggression, while still more or less in accordance with the original plan yet conducted hastily and often without much of a detailed plan at all, had the primary aim to save the petrodollar by preventing any alternative from emerging. Without the primal petrodollar they wouldn’t be able to run the massive deficit needed to struggle for Full World Domination (FWD). The dollar must remain the world’s primary reserve currency or the house of cards masquerading as empire masquerading as democracy will crumble. It was and still is a rat race against their own demise.

All this bombing, chaos and destruction launched upon the world since 2001 had less PNAC, let alone “Israel”, in mind, but increasingly the assurance of further dollar investments in their debt, the most precious “natural resource” to keep the colossus colossal. Imagine a big fat drug-addicted bully who pummels weaker school children to prove that he is theoretically solvent because he could theoretically take anyone’s lunch money, so that, therefore, other junkie kids borrow him money which he then uses to buy more dope to be fit enough to pummel more kids. This is how the global economy has been working in the early 21st century before Russia and China started to collude effectively to ensure Eurasian integration and a multipolar, post-dollar world.

The difference between the US regime’s pre- and post-millennial actions have been that the former had been carried out carefully, quite successfully and according to plan, while the latter had been executed extremely sloppily and, except for the case of Libya, essentially failed (if the mess is on Europe it is a success to US cartels). Russia “snatched” Crimea, EU and Iran now want to trade oil in euro, Germany is increasingly free-trading with China, Iraq is colluding with Iran, which is selling its oil in yuan to China, and Saudi Barbaria is about to follow suit. The mercenary war against Syria, last hope for the imperialists, has failed because Russia, which has resurrected under pesky Putin, has ruined it for them. If you ask me, ever since the millennium the US regime acts under increasing panic of losing not only their precious PNAC, but also their imperial lifeline: the dollar. The fact alone that the empire is now increasingly relying on mercenaries, be it Academi or ISIS, shows the desperation. The Anglo-American establishments have for about five centuries followed Machiavellian principles and the use of mercenaries is not one of them. When (not if) the dollar crumbles, the empire will never resurrect from the rubble that will be left. This was pretty much the exact situation under which the Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump Punch and Judy show was performed.

Realpolitik in a World of Delusions

I must admit, I still can’t quite figure out Trump, but I am convinced that the cartels’ original plan was to install Hillary in order to blind liberals with her pink hat the same way they had before blinded them with O’Bomber’s dark complexion. To liberals women and minorities are fluffy teddy bears unable to do evil stuff and if they go to war then it will be nothing but a humanitarian pillow fight. Rednecks and conservatives, however, have never caused much trouble for the cartels since they had always been patriotically following their leaders and happily joined any mayhem as the cartels’ cannon fodder. However, the latter now were so discontent with their dire social and economic situation, a domestic consequence that is inevitable for any empire, that after generations of patriotic cheering for war they had become a liability as well. From the cartels’ view Trump turned out to be the better choice. The liberals are now too focused on his chauvinist personality and imagined Russian collusion to notice his disastrous policies, while the grumpy nostalgics still at large view him as their big Orange Hero. While the plebs are in this way tamed and focused, he surely seems to be compliant enough on issues like Syria, Iran, Korea or Zionist apartheid not to be assassinated. But he also keeps antagonizing the US cartels’ core allies in Europe, even the UK now, and that seems rather weird, doesn’t it? I consider it to be a massive sign of the deep perplexity the cartels are in.

If the US regime was a proper republic instead of a criminal enterprise and its deep state as pragmatic as, say, the German deep state, they would surely do the only right thing there is to do in their very host country: dismantle the US military empire and invest heavily in infrastructure at home. The economy would get a boost from such mundane tasks as repairing bridges and highways, but there is plenty of more room to invest. The US doesn’t even have high speed trains, it has a 3rd world power grid, and its family homes still mostly consist of heat wasting carpet boxes. There are also vast possibilities for renewable energies in sunny and windy U.S.A. which, regardless of whether you choose to believe Exxonmobil or science, offer great economic value. Imagine the number of proper jobs that could be created by just bringing the domestic US into the 21st century. That would be realpolitiks. And hopefully will be the future of the United States.

The military highway has been bloating GDP with a certain success for the cartels for years, but it’s a dead end now. Even if they had installed cat-tish, insane Hillary in Washington, the US would still not be able to attack Iran – the Europeans would still not have followed, and it would still turn out a ruinous endeavor. The US empire has simply run out of attackable enemies to pretend to be powerful. Even Venezuela would be too hard for them to attack as they’d entangle themselves in an endless guerrilla war in the jungle, something they’re not exactly brilliant at. Besides, the times when the American people still “cattled” behind every given war are over, and I don’t see any significant European nation to follow. So, what’s left to do? If they went down the road of realpolitiks, the cartels’ would lose their more than two centuries old absolute power over the US. For example, if the US brought their energy regime more closely to the 21st century, the big oil and big nuke cartels would lose out a lot to the more decentralized renewables which then belonged to farmers or local communities (a struggle that is still far from over here in Germany). Large central investments are as key in corporate capitalism round table style as they were in state capitalism Soviet style. The empire cannot be saved, but everything that could save the domestic US from its demise and collapse would in the end mean the end of the iron grip of power of Wall St, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Military-Industrial-Complex, etc. The criminal enterprise that we have known as the U.S.A. is about to come to an end either way – involuntarily and violently destroying the country or voluntarily and peacefully preserving the country. If you haven’t seen the film Der Untergang yet, I assume you should do now by all means.

The cartels don’t give a rat’s arse over the country. That’s why, instead of focusing on domestic issues, they are now going for desperate measures to try to “discipline” Europeans, Chinese, and even Rwanda with silly tariffs in order to somehow keep the global dollar regime by asserting an illusion of power – and with Europeans they’ll always find pleasurable surrender monkeys. But the dollar regime is ending. The greenback will surely remain an important currency (unless it fully collapses), but only next to others like the euro and yuan. I think, they’re still trying to figure out what to do next, not realizing that there is nothing to do next but to deviate from imperialism. The one thing they can count on, however, appears to be the infinite asininity of the American public who now seem to be less divided over Democrat vs Republican groupthink, over empire vs domestic, but more between the Great Russia Panic and the Great Jew Panic. This is painfully face=palming to watch from over here, I can tell you that with all my benevolent heart.

Collapse, civil war, disintegration seem to be ahead for the US. The world in the 2030s might even be a world without the U.S.A., entirely. Instead there might be several new countries on the North American map. And why not? Texas, California and Florida could surely do alone economically, and Hawaii and their “howdies” don’t even belong to the US one single bit. The smartest grassroots movements in America would call for segregation of their respective state or states such as the Pacific ones. I hate to say it but my money is on a violent collapse and disintegration of the US hopefully not tearing Canada down with them. The erratic empire is down falling, and while that’s a great thing for humanity in the long run, including for Americans who I believe will eventually benefit from such catharsis, it will at first turn out to be extremely ugly.

SC176-9

https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/114485/long-anticipated-crash-now-upon-us

Is The Long-Anticipated Crash Now Upon Us?
Is this the market's breaking point?

I admit: I'm a permabear.

This is no surprise to those who know and have followed me over the years. But I'm publicly proclaiming my 'bearishness' because doing so might open up a needed and long overdue dialog.

Here's my fundamental position: Infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

Cutting to the chase, this is why I predict a major crash/collapse across stocks, bonds and real estate is on the way.

The recent market weakness seen over the past two weeks is nothing compared to what's in store. As we’ve been carefully chronicling, bubbles burst from ‘the outside in’, starting at the weaker places at the periphery before progressing to the center.

Emerging market equities are now down -26% from their January highs and -18% year-to-date. China's stocks market is down -32%, even with substantial intervention by the government to prop things up.

The periphery has been weakening all year, and the contagion has now spead worldwide.

Taken as a whole, global equities have shed some $13 trillion of market capitalization for a -15% decline:

The rot has spread to the core with surprising speed. Now even the formerly bullet-proof US equity markets are stumbling.

The S&P 500 is now negative on the year:

It’s been obvious for a long time to those who have watched The Crash Course that endless growth is simply not possible. Not for a bacteria colony in a petrie dish, not for an economy, not for any species on the planet. Eventually, when finite resources are involved, limits matter.

But the vast majority of society pretends as if this isn't true.

The US government is (and has been for decades) adding to its massive pile of debt at a rate far faster than it's income (GDP) is growing. Pension managers have a horizon measued in decades, and yet they buy stocks and bonds that can only pay off if endless growth occurs (e.g., 100+ P/E ratios). Much of today's buildings and public works will need to be rebuilt/replaced within the next 50 years, yet no one is certain whether we'll have enough affordable energy to do so.

In regards to the financial markets specficially, history has given us clear lessons to heed. 1929, 1987, 2001 and 2008 each showed us that when the world gets so manic that investors must believe in perpetual perfection/endless growth to justify current asset prices, a painful correction ensues as the limits of reality re-assert themselves.
Bulls vs. Bears

My permabear-ishness is a by-product of peering into the future and not being able to align society's hopes with what I see as the current trajectory of the world.

As a baby boomer, this sets me apart somewhat from my age cohort, many of whom have benefitted as our generation has lived beyond its means. But it’s not all unusual to find young adults, peering ahead into a diminished future, who share my views.

So when I look at today's markets, I ask: What’s the purpose or point of investing in financial assets that, by definition, depend upon a logical fallacy (endless growth) being true? None at all.

Now, in the short term, if you believe yourself to be smarter and more nimble than the rest, maybe you can find advantage in speculating over the short term. (And good luck with that, by the way...)

But for the average person? Is parking money in a 401k in a general index fund(s), crossing one’s fingers and hoping that the next twenty years will behave like the last twenty a good bet? Not if sustained economic growth continues to remain elusive the way is has since the 2008 crisis.
The Bull Trap

By definition, stock market bulls believe in growth, specifically endless growth. They believe, over time, the markets will head ever upwards.

As I’ve said I don’t believe that endless growth is possible. But more than that, I think, were it possible, it would be harmful to humans and planetary life in general.

I used to believe in growth. In my early career as a consultant, I even helped companies chase it. But as I became more familiar with the scientific data and connected a few dots, I realized my views regarding growth were naive. And in some cases entirely backwards.

For instance: In my MBA courses, I was taught that at a high enough price, new supply will always emerge to meet the market demand.

But a tiny bit of inquiry quickly reveals that the economy doesn’t deliver resources, instead we have an economy because there are natural resources to use. No resources, no economy. The economy is a subset of the natural world, not the other way around.

Most people get that intuitively, but it remains a mystery why so many stumble on the idea that ever more economic growth requires ever more resources. They ignore the reality that, at some point, resource limits matter.

And within the resource story, energy is THE master resource. No energy and you can’t have anything else. No economy. Nothing.

Even more precisely, surplus energy (also called "net energy") is what powers everything you and I hold dear about our amazing, just-in-time, global lifestyle. If a Cheetah expends more calories hunting than it actually catches, it dies. Every organism only thrives if it has a surplus of chemical energy compared to what it expends.

Simply put, humans are using up hundreds of millions of years of stored ancient sunlight (via fossil fuels) in the equivalent of a geological microsecond. It's been a one-time-only bonanza for our species. One that is fast approaching it's end.

Hey, it’s been fun. And we’re doing some really cool things with all that surplus fossil energy, like space travel and smart phones. But one thing we haven't done is invest for a future that will function when all that tasty surplus fossil energy is gone.

And as we've often written about, the ramifications are already beginning to be felt, and will only get worse over the coming decades.

A critical factor is that our system for running the world is becoming increasingly unstable. As surplus energy decreases, we are using more and more debt to pull tomorrow's prosperity into today to keep the party going.

But that can't last forever. And as 2008 showed us, when the debt stops growing, even briefly, the whole system shudders to a stop. Our current system of credit/money is either expanding or threatening to collapse. It no longer has a middle ground:

The Social Fabric Is Starting To Rend

This idea of growth being dependent on surplus energy is not a very difficult train of logic to follow. But as I’ve learned the hard way when delivering this message over the years, data and logic rarely changes people's behavoir.

People's actions are governed by their beliefs, which are stubbornly housed in our brain's emotional limbic system, not in the more rational cortex. When beliefs get challenged, emotions flare up. Data is irrelevant. Logic doesn’t matter. The backfire effect mushrooms and takes over.

We are now at the most important inflection point in all of human history, yet practically nobody knows about it. But try to raise people's awareness and – wow – does it ever challenge their belief systems. Fear and anger are the first emotions to get triggered, and listeners quickly search for any reason to reject the information.

This is wack-job conspiracy theory! This is failed Malthusian claptrap! This is fear-mongering! You're underestimating human ingenuity! If this were really true, I'd be reading about it in the media!

Over the years, I've heard thousands of these 'reasons' to reject looking critically at the data. It no longer bothers me, as I recognize it for what it truly is: an attempt to protect oneself from having to grapple with the possibility that the promise of endless growth, which our current prosperity is based on, just might not be real.

And I think many folks are nevertheless becoming aware of this on a subconcious level. It's that feeling in our gut we get when we see the 1% live so much better than the rest of us 99%. When we hear how "great" the employment rate is or the stock market is, yet we see so many households struggling to get by as the middle class get squeezed harder and harder between stagnant wages and the rising cost of living. When we see those who run our country and its corporations live by a different, more preferential, set of rules than the public is held to.

I think this explains why tensions and tempers are so high right now, even though very few seem to understand why. It explains why the country is so divided and increasingly desperate. It explains the hyper-partisanship, the turn to opiods, the pipe bombs.

To my way of thinking, a lot of the emotional energy being expended right now is due to the fact that our entire way of being is busy collapsing all around us. Our main narrative of “how life works” is breaking down. This is resuting in an epidemic of grief, depression, anger and sorrow.

(Personal note: If you're near Turners Falls MA on November 6th, 2018 I and a number of other PP members will be attending Stephen Jenkinson’s Nights of Grief & Mystery Tour, which delves into coping strategies for dealing with these emotions head-on. If you want to join us, send an email here).
Is The Crash Upon Us?

So with the wipeout of all 2018's market gains this week, is the next crash upon us? Is the financial system in the process of breaking down, as it did in 2008?

There are a number of indicators we watch closely here at Peak Prosperity. While many are showing signs of distress, we're not yet seeing the kind of systemic arrest we'd expect to see preceding a market seisure.

For instance, even as equities have pulled back, the weakest credit element, here represented by the ETF “JNK” that tracks junk bonds, has barely even budged during the current sell-off:

What tipped me off as a pre-indicator of the 2008 crash was the movement in both the credit markets and the financial companies most dependent on them. Remember, "stocks are for show but bonds are for dough". The serious money playing in the bond market typcially seeks safety before the more risk-loving players in the equity markets catch on.

Similarly, the prices for 'safe haven' US Treasury hasn't rallied by all that much. If there were a panic brewing, we'd expect to see these spiking more violently, even with China beginning to sell their stash and the Fed pulling back:

That “bounce” doesn’t even bring US 20-year bonds back to even for the month of October, let alone return them to where they were in September.

Similarly, gold hasn't rallied that much either in US dollar terms (in euros and yuan is another matter):

Add to the above that the US economy is not (yet) in recession, and a full-blown crash looks unlikely to unfolding before us right now.

BUT, what we are seeing in the markets is exactly the kind of precusor activity we would expect to see in the final stage leading up to a crash.

In Part 2: How Close?, we lay out the indicators we're watching most closely and what they're currently forecasting about the timing of a major market breakdown, as well as reinforce the importance of prudently preparing yourself *now*.

This equity correction has my full attention. No, I don’t think it’s the big one (yet). But, yes, I think the big one is not far behind

In the immediate here and now, focus on getting yourself prepared as best as you can and remain above the emotional fray that's tormenting so many people. It's only going to get worse from here.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/10/24/midterms-2018-battle-of-the-npcs/

Midterms 2018: Battle Of The NPCs

The NPC meme has gone mainstream. Reports by major mass media outlets like the New York Times and the BBC have turned it into a viral sensation, and now everyone and their grandma knows about the meme used to spoof mindless followers of liberal media herd mentality programming. Any venture into the fray of the political Twittersphere now comes with a twist of alternate accounts with gray-faced profile pictures bleating things like “Orange man bad” and “#IMPEACH” in cartoonish mockery of the repetitive lines used by the rank-and-file opposition to Donald Trump.

And it’s great. The foam-brained mainliners of MSNBC and Washington Post propaganda deserve to have their unquestioning faith in establishment narratives mocked at every turn, and the propagandists who promulgate those lies day after day deserve to be lampooned. One of the most fundamentally profane things a human being can do is turn over their mental sovereignty to the institutions and agendas of the powerful, and by allowing themselves to be indoctrinated into establishment narratives that is exactly what is happening. They abdicate their rightful position as a creative participant in this world and allow their mental processes to be transformed into a looping churn of ideas manufactured in some DC think tank for the benefit of a few billionaires and their lackeys.

Interacting with such indoctrinated minions can be very much like interacting with an non-player character (NPC) in a video game. Read the comments section of any popular social media post about Russia or Julian Assange and you’ll see the same three or four spoon-fed talking points repeated over and over again like the “I took an arrow in the knee” guys in Skyrim. If you begin engaging these mechanical regurgitators you’ll find yourself having the exact same conversations, often verbatim, which just so happen to also be arguments promulgated by Rachel Maddow and Seth Abramson not long before.

This happens because an echo chamber has been carefully and deliberately designed to streamline ideas into the heads of Democratic Party loyalists without any interference from outside narratives causing cognitive dissonance. On November 2, 2007, John Podesta wrote an email to billionaires George Soros, Peter Lewis, Herb and Marion Sandler, John Sperling, and millionaire Steve Bing with a detailed and structured overview of material the group had covered during a meeting they’d had in September. Click ‘Attachments’ and then ‘2008 Combined Fundraising, Message and Mobilization Plan’ on this WikiLeaks release to read the full document, page two of which contains the following passage:

“Control the political discourse. So much effort over the past few years has been focused on better coordinating, strengthening, and developing progressive institutions and leaders. Now that this enhanced infrastructure is in place — grassroots organizing; multi-issue advocacy groups; think tanks; youth outreach; faith communities; micro-targeting outfits; the netroots and blogosphere — we need to better utilize these networks to drive the content of politics through a strong “echo chamber” and message delivery system”

And on page four:

“Create a robust echo chamber with progressive messaging that spans from the opposition campaigns to outside groups, academic experts, and bloggers.”

Of course, the only reason Democrats and their plutocratic puppet masters have been working so hard to control political discourse is because Republicans have been using the echo chamber dynamic so effectively against them. During the Bush years it was fascinating to interact with American conservatives because of the way all the pundits on Fox and AM radio would all start saying the same thing about a given issue at the same time, and by the next day all the rank-and-file Republicans would be repeating their input word-for-word in water cooler conversations from coast to coast. Right wingers forget this, but the term “echo chamber” was originally popularized to refer to the way Republicans had successfully streamlined information from think tank to pundit class to rank-and-file conservative media consumer.

Indeed, many of these same right wingers who are going around talking about what hollow, unthinking NPCs liberals are show up in my social media notifications regurgitating think tank-manufactured arguments which have been funneled into their minds by the still very functional GOP echo chamber. It’s beyond me how anyone can see themselves as a sovereign free thinker while believing they’ll be fighting the deep state by voting for Republicans in the midterms or that this administration’s neoconservative warmongering in Iran is perfectly legitimate, but God bless them, they manage.

Both Democratic and Republican party manipulators alike now aggressively control the partisan groupthink within their ranks, because they and their plutocratic owners understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Rank-and-file #Resistance NPCs bleat that Trump is Putin’s puppet and Julian Assange “can leave the embassy whenever he wants” like good little automatons, and MAGA hat-wearing NPCs bleat that their president is “fighting the deep state” and it’s important to elect Republicans because a group of migrants is heading toward the US border right before the 2018 midterms.

In reality, the only people who benefit from Democrats or Republicans controlling the US government are the plutocratic class which owns them both. The #Resistance is an astroturf movement manufactured in DC by establishment manipulators to harness the grassroots energy of the Bernie Sanders movement, and when you strip away the adoring narratives of his supporters and the hysterical narratives of his political opponents, Trump is not significantly different as a president from his predecessors. Both are posing as organic grassroots populism. Both are artificial manipulations staged to herd the public into supporting establishment politics for the benefit of the powerful.

At this point, anyone who still believes either party actually represents their interests is an NPC. No matter what happens in the midterm elections (traditionally a retaking of the House by Democrats and possible gains in the Senate as well, but given Democrats’ fondness for failure lately who knows) the only real winners will be the plutocratic class which holds all the cards and controls all the outcomes regardless of which party is in power. I’m not telling people that voting necessarily makes no difference or that it’s something they should avoid, but I am saying that no real change will come to America until Americans uproot the two-headed one-party system of the oligarchy and replace it with something that serves them.

Until that happens, nobody who believes that giving power to either party will help them is really playing the game. The Democratic and Republican parties are two fists on the same boxer using the same one-two punch combination over and over again, and the person that they are punching is you. You don’t win a boxing match by choosing which fist you’d prefer to get hit with and leaving yourself open to it as often as possible, you win it by fighting the actual boxer. This fight is already currently underway whether you choose to fight back or not. The bell has already been rung and you’ve been eating leather for a long time now.

Don’t be an NPC. Get those gloves up.