https://www.globalresearch.ca/american-thanksgiving-a-pure-glorification-of-racist-barbarity/5359622
American Thanksgiving: A Pure Glorification of Racist Barbarity
Thanksgiving 2019
“The Thanksgiving story is an absolution of the Pilgrims, whose brutal quest for absolute power in the New World is made to seem both religiously motivated and eminently human…. The Mayflower’s cultural heirs are programmed to find glory in their own depravity, and savagery in their most helpless victims, who can only redeem themselves by accepting the inherent goodness of white Americans.”
Nobody but Americans celebrates Thanksgiving. (Canadians have a holiday by the same name, but an entirely different history and political import.) It is reserved by history and the intent of “the founders” as the supremely white American holiday, the most ghoulish event on the national calendar. No Halloween of the imagination can rival the exterminationist reality that was the genesis, and remains the legacy, of the American Thanksgiving. It is the most loathsome, humanity-insulting day of the year – a pure glorification of racist barbarity.
We are thankful that the day grows nearer when the almost four centuries-old abomination will be deprived of its reason for being: white supremacy. Then we may all eat and drink in peace and gratitude for the blessings of humanity’s deliverance from the rule of evil men.
Thanksgiving is much more than a lie – if it were that simple, an historical correction of the record of events in 1600s Massachusetts would suffice to purge the “flaw” in the national mythology. But Thanksgiving is not just a twisted fable, and the mythology it nurtures is itself inherently evil. The real-life events – subsequently revised – were perfectly understood at the time as the first, definitive triumphs of the genocidal European project in New England. The near-erasure of Native Americans in Massachusetts and, soon thereafter, from most of the remainder of the northern English colonial seaboard was the true mission of the Pilgrim enterprise – Act One of the American Dream. African Slavery commenced contemporaneously – an overlapping and ultimately inseparable Act Two.
The last Act in the American drama must be the “root and branch” eradication of all vestiges of Act One and Two – America’s seminal crimes and formative projects. Thanksgiving as presently celebrated – that is, as a national politicalevent – is an affront to civilization.
Celebrating the unspeakable
White America embraced Thanksgiving because a majority of that population glories in the fruits, if not the unpleasant details, of genocide and slavery and feels, on the whole, good about their heritage: a cornucopia of privilege and national power. Children are taught to identify with the good fortune of the Pilgrims. It does not much matter that the Native American and African holocausts that flowed from the feast at Plymouth are hidden from the children’s version of the story – kids learn soon enough that Indians were made scarce and Africans became enslaved. But they will also never forget the core message of the holiday: that the Pilgrims were good people, who could not have purposely set such evil in motion. Just as the first Thanksgivings marked the consolidation of the English toehold in what became the United States, the core ideological content of the holiday serves to validate all that has since occurred on these shores – a national consecration of the unspeakable, a balm and benediction for the victors, a blessing of the fruits of murder and kidnapping, and an implicit obligation to continue the seamless historical project in the present day.
The Thanksgiving story is an absolution of the Pilgrims, whose brutal quest for absolute power in the New World is made to seem both religiously motivated and eminently human. Most importantly, the Pilgrims are depicted as victims – of harsh weather and their own naïve yet wholesome visions of a new beginning. In light of this carefully nurtured fable, whatever happened to the Indians, from Plymouth to California and beyond, in the aftermath of the 1621 dinner must be considered a mistake, the result of misunderstandings – at worst, a series of lamentable tragedies. The story provides the essential first frame of the American saga. It is unalloyed racist propaganda, a tale that endures because it served the purposes of a succession of the Pilgrims’ political heirs, in much the same way that Nazi-enhanced mythology of a glorious Aryan/German past advanced another murderous, expansionist mission.
Thanksgiving is quite dangerous – as were the Pilgrims.
Rejoicing in a cemetery
The English settlers, their ostensibly religious venture backed by a trading company, were glad to discover that they had landed in a virtual cemetery in 1620. Corn still sprouted in the abandoned fields of the Wampanoags [2], but only a remnant of the local population remained around the fabled Rock. In a letter to England, Massachusetts Bay colony founder John Winthrop wrote, “But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection.”
Ever diligent to claim their own advantages as God’s will, the Pilgrims thanked their deity for having “pursued” the Indians to mass death. However, it was not divine intervention that wiped out most of the natives around the village of Patuxet but, most likely, smallpox-embedded blankets planted during an English visit or slave raid. Six years before the Pilgrim landing, a ship sailed into Patuxet’s harbor, captained by none other than the famous seaman and mercenary soldierJohn Smith [3], former leader of the first successful English colony in the New World, at Jamestown, Virginia. Epidemic and slavery followed in his wake, as Debra Glidden described in IMDiversity.com [4]:
In 1614 the Plymouth Company of England, a joint stock company, hired Captain John Smith to explore land in its behalf. Along what is now the coast of Massachusetts in the territory of the Wampanoag, Smith visited the town of Patuxet according to “The Colonial Horizon,” a 1969 book edited by William Goetzinan. Smith renamed the town Plymouth in honor of his employers, but the Wampanoag who inhabited the town continued to call it Patuxet.
The following year Captain Hunt, an English slave trader, arrived at Patuxet. It was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them into slavery for 220 shillings apiece. That practice was described in a 1622 account of happenings entitled “A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affairs in Virginia,” written by Edward Waterhouse. True to the explorer tradition, Hunt kidnapped a number of Wampanoags to sell into slavery.
Another common practice among European explorers was to give “smallpox blankets” to the Indians. Since smallpox was unknown on this continent prior to the arrival of the Europeans, Native Americans did not have any natural immunity to the disease so smallpox would effectively wipe out entire villages with very little effort required by the Europeans. William Fenton describes how Europeans decimated Native American villages in his 1957 work “American Indian and White relations to 1830.” From 1615 to 1619 smallpox ran rampant among the Wampanoags and their neighbors to the north. The Wampanoag lost 70 percent of their population to the epidemic and the Massachusetts lost 90 percent.
Most of the Wampanoag had died from the smallpox epidemic so when the Pilgrims arrived they found well-cleared fields which they claimed for their own. A Puritan colonist, quoted by Harvard University’s Perry Miller, praised the plague that had wiped out the Indians for it was “the wonderful preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ, by his providence for his people’s abode in the Western world.” Historians have since speculated endlessly on why the woods in the region resembled a park to the disembarking Pilgrims in 1620. The reason should have been obvious: hundreds, if not thousands, of people had lived there just five years before.
In less than three generations the settlers would turn all of New England into a charnel house for Native Americans, and fire the economic engines of slavery throughout English-speaking America. Plymouth Rock is the place where the nightmare truly began.
The uninvited?
It is not at all clear what happened at the first – and only – “integrated” Thanksgiving feast. Only two written accounts of the three-day event exist, and one of them, by Governor William Bradford, was written 20 years after the fact. Was Chief Massasoit invited to bring 90 Indians with him to dine with 52 colonists, most of them women and children? This seems unlikely. A good harvest had provided the settlers with plenty of food, according to their accounts, so the whites didn’t really need the Wampanoag’s offering of five deer. What we do know is that there had been lots of tension between the two groups that fall. John Two-Hawks, who runs the Native Circle [5] web site, gives a sketch of the facts:
“Thanksgiving’ did not begin as a great loving relationship between the pilgrims and the Wampanoag, Pequot and Narragansett people. In fact, in October of 1621 when the pilgrim survivors of their first winter in Turtle Island sat down to share the first unofficial ‘Thanksgiving’ meal, the Indians who were there were not even invited! There was no turkey, squash, cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie. A few days before this alleged feast took place, a company of ‘pilgrims’ led by Miles Standish actively sought the head of a local Indian chief, and an 11 foot high wall was erected around the entire Plymouth settlement for the very purpose of keeping Indians out!”
It is much more likely that Chief Massasoit either crashed the party, or brought enough men to ensure that he was not kidnapped or harmed by the Pilgrims. Dr. Tingba Apidta, in his “Black Folks’ Guide to Understanding Thanksgiving [6],” surmises that the settlers “brandished their weaponry” early and got drunk soon thereafter. He notes that “each Pilgrim drank at least a half gallon of beer a day, which they preferred even to water. This daily inebriation led their governor, William Bradford, to comment on his people’s ‘notorious sin,’ which included their ‘drunkenness and uncleanliness’ and rampant ‘sodomy.'”
Soon after the feast the brutish Miles Standish “got his bloody prize,” Dr. Apidta writes:
“He went to the Indians, pretended to be a trader, then beheaded an Indian man named Wituwamat. He brought the head to Plymouth, where it was displayed on a wooden spike for many years, according to Gary B. Nash, ‘as a symbol of white power.’ Standish had the Indian man’s young brother hanged from the rafters for good measure. From that time on, the whites were known to the Indians of Massachusetts by the name ‘Wotowquenange,’ which in their tongue meant cutthroats and stabbers.”
What is certain is that the first feast was not called a “Thanksgiving” at the time; no further integrated dining occasions were scheduled; and the first, official all-Pilgrim “Thanksgiving” had to wait until 1637, when the whites of New England celebrated the massacre of the Wampanoag’s southern neighbors, the Pequots.
The real Thanksgiving Day Massacre
The Pequots today own the Foxwood Casino and Hotel [7], in Ledyard, Connecticut, with gross gaming revenues of over $9 billion in 2000. This is truly a (very belated) miracle, since the real first Pilgrim Thanksgiving was intended as the Pequot’s epitaph. Sixteen years after the problematical Plymouth feast, the English tried mightily to erase the Pequots from the face of the Earth, and thanked God for the blessing.
Having subdued, intimidated or made mercenaries of most of the tribes of Massachusetts, the English turned their growing force southward, toward the rich Connecticut valley, the Pequot’s sphere of influence. At the point where the Mystic River meets the sea, the combined force of English and allied Indians bypassed the Pequot fort to attack and set ablaze a town full of women, children and old people.
William Bradford, the former Governor of Plymouth and one of the chroniclers of the 1621 feast, was also on hand for the great massacre of 1637:
“Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.”
The rest of the white folks thought so, too. “This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots,” read Governor John Winthrop’s proclamation. The authentic Thanksgiving Day was born.
Most historians believe about 700 Pequots were slaughtered at Mystic. Many prisoners were executed, and surviving women and children sold into slavery in the West Indies. Pequot prisoners that escaped execution were parceled out to Indian tribes allied with the English. The Pequot were thought to have been extinguished as a people. According to IndyMedia [8], “The Pequot tribe numbered 8,000 when the Pilgrims arrived, but disease had brought their numbers down to 1,500 by 1637. The Pequot ‘War’ killed all but a handful of remaining members of the tribe.”
But there were still too many Indians around to suit the whites of New England, who bided their time while their own numbers increased to critical, murderous mass.
Guest’s head on a pole
By the 1670s the colonists, with 8,000 men under arms, felt strong enough to demand that the Pilgrims’ former dinner guests the Wampanoags disarm and submit to the authority of the Crown. After a series of settler provocations in 1675, the Wampanoag struck back, under the leadership of Chief Metacomet, son of Massasoit, called King Philip by the English. Metacomet/Philip, whose wife and son were captured and sold into West Indian slavery, wiped out 13 settlements and killed 600 adult white men before the tide of battle turned. A1996 issue [9] of the Revolutionary Worker provides an excellent narrative.
In their victory, the settlers launched an all-out genocide against the remaining Native people. The Massachusetts government offered 20 shillings bounty for every Indian scalp, and 40 shillings for every prisoner who could be sold into slavery. Soldiers were allowed to enslave any Indian woman or child under 14 they could capture. The “Praying Indians” who had converted to Christianity and fought on the side of the European troops were accused of shooting into the treetops during battles with “hostiles.” They were enslaved or killed. Other “peaceful” Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were invited to negotiate or seek refuge at trading posts – and were sold onto slave ships.
It is not known how many Indians were sold into slavery, but in this campaign,500 enslaved Indians were shipped from Plymouth alone. Of the 12,000 Indians in the surrounding tribes, probably about half died from battle, massacre and starvation.
After King Philip’s War, there were almost no Indians left free in the northern British colonies. A colonist wrote from Manhattan’s New York colony: “There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first settled in these parts.” In Massachusetts, the colonists declared a “day of public thanksgiving” in 1676, saying, “there now scarce remains a name or family of them [the Indians] but are either slain, captivated or fled.”
Fifty-five years after the original Thanksgiving Day, the Puritans had destroyed the generous Wampanoag and all other neighboring tribes. The Wampanoag chief King Philip was beheaded. His head was stuck on a pole in Plymouth, where the skull still hung on display 24 years later.
This is not thought to be a fit Thanksgiving tale for the children of today, but it’s the real story, well-known to the settler children of New England at the time – the white kids who saw the Wampanoag head on the pole year after year and knew for certain that God loved them best of all, and that every atrocity they might ever commit against a heathen, non-white was blessed.
There’s a good term for the process thus set in motion: nation-building.
Roots of the slave trade
The British North American colonists’ practice of enslaving Indians for labor or direct sale to the West Indies preceded the appearance of the first chained Africans at the dock in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The Jamestown colonists’ human transaction with the Dutch vessel was an unscheduled occurrence. However, once the African slave trade became commercially established, the fates of Indians and Africans in the colonies became inextricably entwined. New England, born of up-close-and-personal, burn-them-in-the-fires-of-hell genocide, led the political and commercial development of the English colonies. The region also led the nascent nation’s descent into a slavery-based society and economy.
Ironically, an apologist for Virginian slavery made one of the best, early cases for the indictment of New England as the engine of the American slave trade. Unreconstructed secessionist Lewis Dabney’s 1867 book “A Defense of Virginia”[10] traced the slave trade’s origins all the way back to Plymouth Rock:
“The planting of the commercial States of North America began with the colony of Puritan Independents at Plymouth, in 1620, which was subsequently enlarged into the State of Massachusetts. The other trading colonies, Rhode Island and Connecticut, as well as New Hampshire (which never had an extensive shipping interest), were offshoots of Massachusetts. They partook of the same characteristics and pursuits; and hence, the example of the parent colony is taken here as a fair representation of them.
“The first ship from America, which embarked in the African slave trade, was theDesire, Captain Pierce, of Salem; and this was among the first vessels ever built in the colony. The promptitude with which the “Puritan Fathers” embarked in this business may be comprehended, when it is stated that the Desire sailed upon her voyage in June, 1637. [Note: the year they massacred the Pequots.] The first feeble and dubious foothold was gained by the white man at Plymouth less than seventeen years before; and as is well known, many years were expended by the struggle of the handful of settlers for existence. So that it may be correctly said, that the commerce of New England was born of the slave trade; as its subsequent prosperity was largely founded upon it. The Desire, proceeding to the Bahamas, with a cargo of ‘dry fish and strong liquors, the only commodities for those parts,’ obtained the negroes from two British men-of-war, which had captured them from a Spanish slaver.
“Thus, the trade of which the good ship Desire, of Salem, was the harbinger, grew into grand proportions; and for nearly two centuries poured a flood of wealth into New England, as well as no inconsiderable number of slaves. Meanwhile, the other maritime colonies of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and Connecticut, followed the example of their elder sister emulously; and their commercial history is but a repetition of that of Massachusetts. The towns of Providence, Newport, and New Haven became famous slave trading ports. The magnificent harbor of the second, especially, was the favorite starting-place of the slave ships; and its commerce rivaled, or even exceeded, that of the present commercial metropolis, New York. All the four original States, of course, became slaveholding.”
The Revolution that exploded in 1770s New England was undertaken by men thoroughly imbued with the worldview of the Indian-killer and slave-holder. How could they not be? The “country” they claimed as their own was fathered by genocide and mothered by slavery – its true distinction among the commercial nations of the world. And these men were not ashamed, but proud, with vast ambition to spread their exceptional characteristics West and South and wherever their so-far successful project in nation-building might take them – and by the same bloody, savage methods that had served them so well in the past.
At the moment of deepest national crisis following the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln invoked the national fable that is far more central to the white American personality than Lincoln’s battlefield “Address.” Lincoln seized upon the 1621 feast as the historic “Thanksgiving” – bypassing the official and authentic 1637 precedent – and assigned the dateless, murky event the fourth Thursday in November. Lincoln surveyed a broken nation, and attempted nation-rebuilding, based on the purest white myth. The same year that he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he renewed the national commitment to a white manifest destiny that began at Plymouth Rock. Lincoln sought to rekindle a shared national mission that former Confederates and Unionists and white immigrants from Europe could collectively embrace. It was and remains a barbaric and racist national unifier, by definition. Only the most fantastic lies can sanitize the history of the Plymouth Colony of Massachusetts.
“Like a rock”
The Thanksgiving holiday fable is at once a window on the way that many, if not most, white Americans view the world and their place in it, and a pollutant that leaches barbarism into the modern era. The fable attempts to glorify the indefensible, to enshrine an era and mission that represent the nation’s lowest moral denominators. Thanksgiving as framed in the mythology is, consequently, a drag on that which is potentially civilizing in the national character, a crippling, atavistic deformity. Defenders of the holiday will claim that the politically-corrected children’s version promotes brotherhood, but that is an impossibility – a bald excuse to prolong the worship of colonial “forefathers” and to erase the crimes they committed. Those bastards burned the Pequot women and children, and ushered in the multinational business of slavery. These are facts. The myth is an insidious diversion – and worse.
Humanity cannot tolerate a 21st Century superpower, much of whose population perceives the world through the eyes of 17th Century land and flesh bandits. Yet that is the trick that fate has played on the globe. We described the roots of the planetary dilemma in our March 13 commentary, “Racism & War, Perfect Together. [11]”
The English arrived with criminal intent – and brought wives and children to form new societies predicated on successful plunder. To justify the murderous enterprise, Indians who had initially cooperated with the squatters were transmogrified into “savages” deserving displacement and death. The relentlessly refreshed lie of Indian savagery became a truth in the minds of white Americans, a fact to be acted upon by every succeeding generation of whites. The settlers became a singular people confronting the great “frontier” – a euphemism for centuries of genocidal campaigns against a darker, “savage” people marked for extinction.
The necessity of genocide was the operative, working assumption of the expanding American nation. “Manifest Destiny” was born at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, later to fall (to paraphrase Malcolm) like a rock on Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua, etc. Little children were taught that the American project was inherently good, Godly, and that those who got in the way were “evil-doers” or just plain subhuman, to be gloriously eliminated. The lie is central to white American identity, embraced by waves of European settlers who never saw a red person.
Only a century ago, American soldiers caused the deaths of possibly a million Filipinos whom they had been sent to “liberate” from Spanish rule. They didn’t even know who they were killing, and so rationalized their behavior by substituting the usual American victims. Colonel Funston [12], of the Twentieth Kansas Volunteers, explained what got him motivated in the Philippines:
“Our fighting blood was up and we all wanted to kill ‘niggers.’ This shooting human beings is a ‘hot game,’ and beats rabbit hunting all to pieces.” Another wrote that “the boys go for the enemy as if they were chasing jack-rabbits …. I, for one, hope that Uncle Sam will apply the chastening rod, good, hard, and plenty, and lay it on until they come into the reservation and promise to be good ‘Injuns.'”
Last week in northern Iraq another American colonel, Joe Anderson of the 101st Airborne (Assault) Division, revealed that he is incapable of perceiving Arabs as human beings. Colonel Anderson, who doubles as a commander and host of a radio call-in program and a TV show designed to win the hearts and minds of the people of Mosul, had learned that someone was out to assassinate him. In the wild mood swing common to racists, Anderson decided that Iraqis are all alike – and of a different breed. He said as much to the Los Angeles Times [13].
“They don’t understand being nice,” said Anderson, who helps oversee the military zone that includes Mosul and environs. He doesn’t hide his irritation after months dedicated to restoring the city: “We spent so long here working with kid gloves, but the average Iraqi guy will tell you, ‘The only thing people respect here is violence…. They only understand being shot at, being killed. That’s the culture.’ … Nice guys do finish last here.”
Col. Anderson personifies the unfitness of Americans to play a major role in the world, much less rule it. “We poured a lot of our heart and soul into trying to help the people,” he bitched, as if Americans were God’s gift to the planet. “But it can be frustrating when you hear stupid people still saying, ‘You’re occupiers. You want our oil. You’re turning our country over to Israel.'” He cannot fathom that other people – non-whites – aspire to run their own affairs, and will kill and die to achieve that basic right.
What does this have to do with the Mayflower? Everything. Although possibly against their wishes, the Pilgrims hosted the Wampanoag for three no doubt anxious days. The same men killed and enslaved Wampanoags immediately before and after the feast. They, their newly arrived English comrades and their children roasted hundreds of neighboring Indians alive just 16 years later, and two generations afterwards cleared nearly the whole of New England of its indigenous “savages,” while enthusiastically enriching themselves through the invention of transoceanic, sophisticated means of enslaving millions. The Mayflower’s cultural heirs are programmed to find glory in their own depravity, and savagery in their most helpless victims, who can only redeem themselves by accepting the inherent goodness of white Americans.
Thanksgiving encourages these cognitive cripples in their madness, just as it is designed to do.
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Friday, November 29, 2019
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52630.htm
American Exceptionalism Driving World to War – John Pilger
Australian-born John Pilger has worked for over five decades as a reporter and documentary film-maker covering wars and conflicts all over the world. In the following interview, the award-winning journalist says the world is arguably at a more perilous geopolitical juncture than even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 at the height of the Cold War. This is because American “exceptionalism” – which, he points out, mirrors that of Nazi Germany – has developed into a hyper-rogue phase. The relentless denigration of Russia by American and Western media show that there are few red lines left to restrain aggression towards Moscow, as there were, at least, during the past Cold War. Russia and China’s refusal to bow down to Washington’s dictate is infuriating the would-be American hegemon and its desire for zero-sum world domination.
John Pilger also gives his wide-ranging views on the systematic deterioration of Western mainstream journalism which has come to function as a nakedly propaganda matrix for power and corporate profit. He further condemns the ongoing persecution and torture of fellow-Australian publisher Julian Assange who is being held in a maximum-security British prison commonly used for holding mass murderers and convicted terrorists. Assange is being persecuted for telling the truth and for exposing huge crimes by the US and Britain, says Pilger. It is a grim warning of a covert war that is being conducted against independent journalism and free speech, and, more ominously, indicative of a slide towards police-state fascism in so-called Western democracies.
INTERVIEW
Question: In your documentary film, The Coming War on China (2016), you assess that the United States is on a strategic collision path with China for control of Asia-Pacific. Do you still see the threat of war looming between these two powers?
John Pilger: The threat of war may not be immediate, but we know or should know that events can change fast: a chain of incidents and missteps can ignite a war which can spread unpredictably. The calculations are not in dispute: an “enemy” has barely 12 minutes to decide whether and where to order a nuclear retaliation.
Question: Recently, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of being “truly hostile to America’s interests”. What in your view is motivating US concerns about China?
John Pilger: The State Department once declared, “To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat.” At the root of much of humanity’s insecurity is, remarkably, the self-belief and self-delusion of one nation: the United States. America’s notion of itself is often difficult for the rest of us to comprehend. From the days of President Teddy Roosevelt, the “sacred mission” has been to dominate humanity and its vital resources, if not by intimidation and bribery then by violence. In the 1940s, American “war intellectuals”, such as the diplomat and historian George F Kennan, described the necessity of American dominance of the “Grand Area”, which is most of the world, notably Eurasia, and especially China. Non-Americans were to be cast in “our image”, wrote Kennan; America was the exemplar. Hollywood has reflected this with striking accuracy.
In 1945, this vision, or mania, was given a moral makeover with the defeat of Nazi Germany. Today, many Americans believe their country won the Second World War and that they are the “exceptional” human beings. This mythology (reminiscent of Nazi propaganda) has long had an evangelical hold in the US and is the central pillar of the need to dominate, which requires enemies and fear. America’s long history of racism towards Asia and its historic humiliation of the Chinese people make China a perfect fit as the current enemy.
I should add that “exceptionalism” is not only embraced by the American right. Although they may not admit it, many liberals believe it in it, as do those who describe themselves as “left”. It’s the spawn of the most rapacious ideology on earth: Americanism. That this word is rarely uttered is part of its power.
Question: Do you think it is a strange anomaly that the Trump administration has adopted an aggressive policy towards China, yet this American president appears to seek more friendly relations with Russia?
John Pilger: Dividing China and Russia with the aim of weakening both is a venerable American game. Henry Kissinger played it. As for Trump, it’s impossible to know what he thinks. Regardless of his overtures to Putin, the US has aggressively subverted Ukraine and militarized Russia’s western border and is a more immediate threat to Russia than it is to China.
Question: Do you think the impeachment process underway against Trump is tantamount to a coup to get rid of him by the Deep State because of his relatively benign stance towards Russia?
John Pilger: That’s one theory; I’m not so sure. Trump’s election in 2016 disturbed a Mafia-like system of tribal back-scratching, which the Democrats dominate. Hillary Clinton was the Chosen One; how dare Trump seize her throne. Many American liberals refuse to see their corrupt heroine as a standard bearer of Wall Street, a warmonger and an emblem of hi-jacked gender politics. Clinton is the embodiment of a venal system, Trump is its caricature.
Question: You have worked for over five decades as a war reporter and documentary film-maker in Vietnam, elsewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America. How do you see current international tensions between the US, China and Russia? Do you think the danger of war is greater now than in previous times?
John Pilger: In 1962, we all may have been saved by the refusal of a Soviet naval officer, Vasili Arkhipov, to fire a nuclear torpedo at US ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Are we in greater danger today? During the Cold War, there were lines that the other side dared not cross. There are few if any lines now; the US surrounds China with 400 military bases and sails its low-draught ships into Chinese waters and flies its drones in Chinese airspace. American-led NATO forces mass on the same Russian frontier the Nazis crossed; the Russian president is insulted as a matter of routine. There is no restraint and none of the diplomacy that kept the old Cold War cold. In the West, we have acquiesced as bystanders in our own countries, preferring to look away (or at our smart phones) rather than break free of the post-modernism entrapping us with its specious “identity” distractions.
Question: You travelled extensively in the US during the Cold War years. You witnessed the assassination of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in 1968. It seems the American Cold War obsession with “communism as an evil” has been replaced by an equally intense Russophobia towards modern-day Russia. Do you see a continuation in the phobia from the Cold War years to today? What accounts for that mindset?
John Pilger: The Russians refuse to bow down to America, and that is intolerable. They play an independent, mostly positive role in the Middle East, the antithesis of America’s violent subversions, and that is unbearable. Like the Chinese, they have forged peaceful and fruitful alliances with people all over the world, and that is unacceptable to the US Godfather. The constant defamation of all things Russian is a symptom of decline and panic, as if the United States has departed the 21st century for the 19th century, obsessed with a proprietorial view of the world. In the circumstances, the phobia you describe is hardly surprising.
Question: How has news journalism, specifically in Western states, changed over the course of your career? You have won multiple awards for your writing and film-making, yet today one rarely reads your articles published in mainstream media even though you are still actively working as a journalist as per your own website?
John Pilger: Journalism wasn’t corporate when I began. Most newspapers in Britain were a faithful reflection of the interests of what was known as the Establishment, but they could also be idiosyncratic. When I came to Fleet Street in London during the early 1960s, then known as the “Mecca of newspapers”, the times were optimistic and the most right-wing newspapers tolerated, even encouraged mavericks, who are often the best journalists. The Daily Mirror, then the biggest circulating newspaper on earth apart from the People’s Daily, was the soldiers’ paper during the Second World War and became, for millions of Britons, their paper. To those of us on the Mirror, it was something of an ideal to be the agents and defenders of people, not power.
Today, true mavericks are redundant in the mainstream media. Corporate public relations is the real force in modern journalism. Look at the way news is written: almost none of it is straight. I wrote for many years for the Guardian; my last piece was five years ago after which I received a phone call. I was purged, along with other independent writers. The Guardian now promotes fiction about Russia, obsessively, the interests of Britain’s intelligence services, Israel, the US Democratic Party, bourgeois gender imperatives and an unctuous view of itself. The paper’s witch-hunt against Julian Assange – part of a campaign which the UN Rapporteur on Torture refers to as “mobbing” – includes fabrication of a kind previously associated with the rightwing Murdoch press; certainly, its cruelty towards Assange is a profanity on the liberal values for which it claims to stand.
Question: You have been a prominent supporter of Julian Assange, the founding editor of WikiLeaks, who is currently imprisoned in Britain awaiting an extradition trial next year to the US on charges of espionage. What’s really behind the incarceration of Assange?
John Pilger: Julian Assange is what journalists should be and rarely are: he is a tireless, fearless truth-teller. He has exposed, on a vast scale, the secret, criminal life of great power: of “our” governments, their lying and violence in our name. Ten years ago, WikiLeaks leaked a British Ministry of Defense document that described investigative journalism as the greatest threat to secretive power. Investigative journalists were rated higher on the threat scale than “Russian spies” and “terrorists”. Assange and WikiLeaks can claim that laurel. If the Americans come for him and incarcerate him in a hell hole, they will come for others, including those journalists who simply do their job. And they will come for their editors and publishers too.
Question: You make the point that Assange shames the mainstream Western media because Wikileaks published damning information exposing huge war crimes committed by the US and its NATO allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, while the mainstream media ignored those crimes or give them relatively scant coverage. Does that explain why these media are ignoring Assange’s plight?
John Pilger: There is, at last, a growing realization that the gross injustice against Assange is likely to happen to others. The recent statement by Britain’s National Union of Journalists is a sign of change. The silence must be broken if journalists are to reclaim their honor.
Question: You have recently visited Assange in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison where he is being held in solitary confinement. How would you describe his physical and mental condition? You say he is being subjected to a show-trial. Is his mistreatment comparable to what Western media would condemn as persecution under dictatorships?
John Pilger: Julian’s last court appearance on October 21 was effectively controlled by four Americans from the US Embassy who sat behind the prosecutor and passed their written instructions to him by hand. The judge watched this outrage and allowed it to continue. At the same time, she treated Julian’s lawyers with contempt. When Julian, who is ill, struggled to speak his name, she sneered. The difference from a Cold War show-trial was that this was not broadcast on state television; the BBC blacked it out.
Question: With the arrest of Julian Assange and other independent journalists like Max Blumenthal in the US who exposed Washington’s regime-change crimes in Venezuela, and given the silent indifference of Western media, do you think it is a real concern that the US is sliding towards police-state fascism?
John Pilger: Some would argue the slide has happened.
American Exceptionalism Driving World to War – John Pilger
Australian-born John Pilger has worked for over five decades as a reporter and documentary film-maker covering wars and conflicts all over the world. In the following interview, the award-winning journalist says the world is arguably at a more perilous geopolitical juncture than even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 at the height of the Cold War. This is because American “exceptionalism” – which, he points out, mirrors that of Nazi Germany – has developed into a hyper-rogue phase. The relentless denigration of Russia by American and Western media show that there are few red lines left to restrain aggression towards Moscow, as there were, at least, during the past Cold War. Russia and China’s refusal to bow down to Washington’s dictate is infuriating the would-be American hegemon and its desire for zero-sum world domination.
John Pilger also gives his wide-ranging views on the systematic deterioration of Western mainstream journalism which has come to function as a nakedly propaganda matrix for power and corporate profit. He further condemns the ongoing persecution and torture of fellow-Australian publisher Julian Assange who is being held in a maximum-security British prison commonly used for holding mass murderers and convicted terrorists. Assange is being persecuted for telling the truth and for exposing huge crimes by the US and Britain, says Pilger. It is a grim warning of a covert war that is being conducted against independent journalism and free speech, and, more ominously, indicative of a slide towards police-state fascism in so-called Western democracies.
INTERVIEW
Question: In your documentary film, The Coming War on China (2016), you assess that the United States is on a strategic collision path with China for control of Asia-Pacific. Do you still see the threat of war looming between these two powers?
John Pilger: The threat of war may not be immediate, but we know or should know that events can change fast: a chain of incidents and missteps can ignite a war which can spread unpredictably. The calculations are not in dispute: an “enemy” has barely 12 minutes to decide whether and where to order a nuclear retaliation.
Question: Recently, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of being “truly hostile to America’s interests”. What in your view is motivating US concerns about China?
John Pilger: The State Department once declared, “To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat.” At the root of much of humanity’s insecurity is, remarkably, the self-belief and self-delusion of one nation: the United States. America’s notion of itself is often difficult for the rest of us to comprehend. From the days of President Teddy Roosevelt, the “sacred mission” has been to dominate humanity and its vital resources, if not by intimidation and bribery then by violence. In the 1940s, American “war intellectuals”, such as the diplomat and historian George F Kennan, described the necessity of American dominance of the “Grand Area”, which is most of the world, notably Eurasia, and especially China. Non-Americans were to be cast in “our image”, wrote Kennan; America was the exemplar. Hollywood has reflected this with striking accuracy.
In 1945, this vision, or mania, was given a moral makeover with the defeat of Nazi Germany. Today, many Americans believe their country won the Second World War and that they are the “exceptional” human beings. This mythology (reminiscent of Nazi propaganda) has long had an evangelical hold in the US and is the central pillar of the need to dominate, which requires enemies and fear. America’s long history of racism towards Asia and its historic humiliation of the Chinese people make China a perfect fit as the current enemy.
I should add that “exceptionalism” is not only embraced by the American right. Although they may not admit it, many liberals believe it in it, as do those who describe themselves as “left”. It’s the spawn of the most rapacious ideology on earth: Americanism. That this word is rarely uttered is part of its power.
Question: Do you think it is a strange anomaly that the Trump administration has adopted an aggressive policy towards China, yet this American president appears to seek more friendly relations with Russia?
John Pilger: Dividing China and Russia with the aim of weakening both is a venerable American game. Henry Kissinger played it. As for Trump, it’s impossible to know what he thinks. Regardless of his overtures to Putin, the US has aggressively subverted Ukraine and militarized Russia’s western border and is a more immediate threat to Russia than it is to China.
Question: Do you think the impeachment process underway against Trump is tantamount to a coup to get rid of him by the Deep State because of his relatively benign stance towards Russia?
John Pilger: That’s one theory; I’m not so sure. Trump’s election in 2016 disturbed a Mafia-like system of tribal back-scratching, which the Democrats dominate. Hillary Clinton was the Chosen One; how dare Trump seize her throne. Many American liberals refuse to see their corrupt heroine as a standard bearer of Wall Street, a warmonger and an emblem of hi-jacked gender politics. Clinton is the embodiment of a venal system, Trump is its caricature.
Question: You have worked for over five decades as a war reporter and documentary film-maker in Vietnam, elsewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America. How do you see current international tensions between the US, China and Russia? Do you think the danger of war is greater now than in previous times?
John Pilger: In 1962, we all may have been saved by the refusal of a Soviet naval officer, Vasili Arkhipov, to fire a nuclear torpedo at US ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Are we in greater danger today? During the Cold War, there were lines that the other side dared not cross. There are few if any lines now; the US surrounds China with 400 military bases and sails its low-draught ships into Chinese waters and flies its drones in Chinese airspace. American-led NATO forces mass on the same Russian frontier the Nazis crossed; the Russian president is insulted as a matter of routine. There is no restraint and none of the diplomacy that kept the old Cold War cold. In the West, we have acquiesced as bystanders in our own countries, preferring to look away (or at our smart phones) rather than break free of the post-modernism entrapping us with its specious “identity” distractions.
Question: You travelled extensively in the US during the Cold War years. You witnessed the assassination of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in 1968. It seems the American Cold War obsession with “communism as an evil” has been replaced by an equally intense Russophobia towards modern-day Russia. Do you see a continuation in the phobia from the Cold War years to today? What accounts for that mindset?
John Pilger: The Russians refuse to bow down to America, and that is intolerable. They play an independent, mostly positive role in the Middle East, the antithesis of America’s violent subversions, and that is unbearable. Like the Chinese, they have forged peaceful and fruitful alliances with people all over the world, and that is unacceptable to the US Godfather. The constant defamation of all things Russian is a symptom of decline and panic, as if the United States has departed the 21st century for the 19th century, obsessed with a proprietorial view of the world. In the circumstances, the phobia you describe is hardly surprising.
Question: How has news journalism, specifically in Western states, changed over the course of your career? You have won multiple awards for your writing and film-making, yet today one rarely reads your articles published in mainstream media even though you are still actively working as a journalist as per your own website?
John Pilger: Journalism wasn’t corporate when I began. Most newspapers in Britain were a faithful reflection of the interests of what was known as the Establishment, but they could also be idiosyncratic. When I came to Fleet Street in London during the early 1960s, then known as the “Mecca of newspapers”, the times were optimistic and the most right-wing newspapers tolerated, even encouraged mavericks, who are often the best journalists. The Daily Mirror, then the biggest circulating newspaper on earth apart from the People’s Daily, was the soldiers’ paper during the Second World War and became, for millions of Britons, their paper. To those of us on the Mirror, it was something of an ideal to be the agents and defenders of people, not power.
Today, true mavericks are redundant in the mainstream media. Corporate public relations is the real force in modern journalism. Look at the way news is written: almost none of it is straight. I wrote for many years for the Guardian; my last piece was five years ago after which I received a phone call. I was purged, along with other independent writers. The Guardian now promotes fiction about Russia, obsessively, the interests of Britain’s intelligence services, Israel, the US Democratic Party, bourgeois gender imperatives and an unctuous view of itself. The paper’s witch-hunt against Julian Assange – part of a campaign which the UN Rapporteur on Torture refers to as “mobbing” – includes fabrication of a kind previously associated with the rightwing Murdoch press; certainly, its cruelty towards Assange is a profanity on the liberal values for which it claims to stand.
Question: You have been a prominent supporter of Julian Assange, the founding editor of WikiLeaks, who is currently imprisoned in Britain awaiting an extradition trial next year to the US on charges of espionage. What’s really behind the incarceration of Assange?
John Pilger: Julian Assange is what journalists should be and rarely are: he is a tireless, fearless truth-teller. He has exposed, on a vast scale, the secret, criminal life of great power: of “our” governments, their lying and violence in our name. Ten years ago, WikiLeaks leaked a British Ministry of Defense document that described investigative journalism as the greatest threat to secretive power. Investigative journalists were rated higher on the threat scale than “Russian spies” and “terrorists”. Assange and WikiLeaks can claim that laurel. If the Americans come for him and incarcerate him in a hell hole, they will come for others, including those journalists who simply do their job. And they will come for their editors and publishers too.
Question: You make the point that Assange shames the mainstream Western media because Wikileaks published damning information exposing huge war crimes committed by the US and its NATO allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, while the mainstream media ignored those crimes or give them relatively scant coverage. Does that explain why these media are ignoring Assange’s plight?
John Pilger: There is, at last, a growing realization that the gross injustice against Assange is likely to happen to others. The recent statement by Britain’s National Union of Journalists is a sign of change. The silence must be broken if journalists are to reclaim their honor.
Question: You have recently visited Assange in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison where he is being held in solitary confinement. How would you describe his physical and mental condition? You say he is being subjected to a show-trial. Is his mistreatment comparable to what Western media would condemn as persecution under dictatorships?
John Pilger: Julian’s last court appearance on October 21 was effectively controlled by four Americans from the US Embassy who sat behind the prosecutor and passed their written instructions to him by hand. The judge watched this outrage and allowed it to continue. At the same time, she treated Julian’s lawyers with contempt. When Julian, who is ill, struggled to speak his name, she sneered. The difference from a Cold War show-trial was that this was not broadcast on state television; the BBC blacked it out.
Question: With the arrest of Julian Assange and other independent journalists like Max Blumenthal in the US who exposed Washington’s regime-change crimes in Venezuela, and given the silent indifference of Western media, do you think it is a real concern that the US is sliding towards police-state fascism?
John Pilger: Some would argue the slide has happened.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
SC201-4
https://www.oftwominds.com/blognov19/hollowed-outUSA11-19.html
The Hollowing Out of America
America is being hollowed out, but since we don't measure what actually matters, the decline has been deep-sixed by the government and media. As I explain in my new book Will You Be Richer or Poorer?, there are a number of reasons why what's important --social capital, for example--doesn't get measured.
The most obvious reason is that it's politically inconvenient for those in power for the hollowing out of America to be quantified. To conceal the decline, institutions only measure what can be massaged to appear positive. These statistics include inflation (Consumer Price Index, CPI),the unemployment rate, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and hundreds of financial numbers: net wealth, bank loans and so on.
Everyone knows from experience that big-ticket expenses such as healthcare (see chart below), childcare, rent, college tuition, etc. have been rising at double-digit rates, while shrinkflation has reduced the quantity and quality of goods even as price has remained unchanged.
In other words, the official statistics are gamed to appear positive even as the nation is being hollowed out. People sense the disconnect but since what actually matters isn't measured, there are few objective indicators of the decline we all experience in everyday life.
The second reason is that it's difficult to measure intangible forms of capital such as social mobility and shared purpose. People are feeling increasingly insecure financially, but how do we measure this with any accuracy? We can track the number of people working second jobs in the gig economy, those with uncertain work schedules, etc., but even households with above-average incomes and conventional white-collar jobs are financially precarious in ways that don't lend themselves to easy quantification.
And so while we're constantly told the American consumer is in good shape, with manageable debt and rising incomes, in the real world auto loan defaults are soaring, 40% of those suffering from cancer are wiped out by the co-pays, and superficially middle-class households are one layoff away from default and insolvency.
As a result, we're like the blind men touching different parts of the elephant and drawing completely erroneous conclusions about the size and nature of the animal. Much of what we measure is misleading (i.e. cheerleading), and what can't be easily measured is dismissed as unimportant. Even worse, we conclude that since we can't measure it easily, it doesn't exist.
America is being hollowed out even as we're constantly hectored that all is well. We're told saving $10 on a pair of poorly made shoes is a tremendous benefit of globalization and neoliberal policies, but does a couple hundred dollars in savings on poorly made stuff (which is itself offset by an unmeasured decline in quality and durability) offset the fact that a huge swath of American households can no longer afford to rent their own apartment or house, much less buy a house?
Does this modest reduction in the cost of consumer goods offset the upward-spiraling cost of healthcare that is bankrupting small business and households? Does it offset the stagnation of wages for the majority of wage-earners? Does it offset the insecurity of work and benefits? Does it offset the decline of competition and the subsequent domination of profiteering monopolies and cartels in the American economy?
The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets From plane tickets to cellphone bills, monopoly power costs American consumers billions of dollars a year.
These are the forces hollowing out America: the relentless rise of the cost of big-ticket essentials while wages stagnate for the bottom 80%; the normalization of profiteering monopolies and cartels who buy tax breaks and regulatory capture in our pay-to-play political system; the decline of social mobility; the erosion of shared purpose and social capital; the silencing of dissent and independent thought; the erosion of financial security as everyone is forced into risky casinos of speculative financialization; the erosion of the rule of law as the super-wealthy are more equal than everyone else; the criminalization of poverty; the decline of small business formation; the erosion of well-being and health; and so on in a long list of landslides in everything that matters that we don't dare measure.
What's Been Normalized? Nothing Good or Positive
Most perniciously, America is being hollowed out as local enterprises that reinvested profits back into their own communities have been wiped out by monopolies and cartels drawing upon unlimited credit lines of cheap money supplied by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, a system that guarantees the top few will collect whatever "wealth" is being generated by globalization and financialization: The 1% grabbed 82% of all wealth created in 2017 (and 2018 and 2019...).
Here is hollowed-out America, an economy of ever-greater financial wealth piling up in the hands of the few while tens of millions of wage-earners can't afford what was available to everyone, even the working class, in previous eras: to buy a family home, however modest; to be able to afford to have children; to build meaningful capital; to have a positive social role in the community; to have a say in the political system; to have the opportunity to become self-employed without gambling the entire family's capital on the venture; access to the ladder of social mobility and access to the shared capital of a functional government and infrastructure.
The whole point my book Will You Be Richer or Poorer? is to contrast the happy story reflected by what we do measure-- an endless increase in financial wealth--with the disturbing account of what we're losing or have already lost that we don't dare measure lest it reveal how little is left of America's non-financial wealth.
The Hollowing Out of America
America is being hollowed out, but since we don't measure what actually matters, the decline has been deep-sixed by the government and media. As I explain in my new book Will You Be Richer or Poorer?, there are a number of reasons why what's important --social capital, for example--doesn't get measured.
The most obvious reason is that it's politically inconvenient for those in power for the hollowing out of America to be quantified. To conceal the decline, institutions only measure what can be massaged to appear positive. These statistics include inflation (Consumer Price Index, CPI),the unemployment rate, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and hundreds of financial numbers: net wealth, bank loans and so on.
Everyone knows from experience that big-ticket expenses such as healthcare (see chart below), childcare, rent, college tuition, etc. have been rising at double-digit rates, while shrinkflation has reduced the quantity and quality of goods even as price has remained unchanged.
In other words, the official statistics are gamed to appear positive even as the nation is being hollowed out. People sense the disconnect but since what actually matters isn't measured, there are few objective indicators of the decline we all experience in everyday life.
The second reason is that it's difficult to measure intangible forms of capital such as social mobility and shared purpose. People are feeling increasingly insecure financially, but how do we measure this with any accuracy? We can track the number of people working second jobs in the gig economy, those with uncertain work schedules, etc., but even households with above-average incomes and conventional white-collar jobs are financially precarious in ways that don't lend themselves to easy quantification.
And so while we're constantly told the American consumer is in good shape, with manageable debt and rising incomes, in the real world auto loan defaults are soaring, 40% of those suffering from cancer are wiped out by the co-pays, and superficially middle-class households are one layoff away from default and insolvency.
As a result, we're like the blind men touching different parts of the elephant and drawing completely erroneous conclusions about the size and nature of the animal. Much of what we measure is misleading (i.e. cheerleading), and what can't be easily measured is dismissed as unimportant. Even worse, we conclude that since we can't measure it easily, it doesn't exist.
America is being hollowed out even as we're constantly hectored that all is well. We're told saving $10 on a pair of poorly made shoes is a tremendous benefit of globalization and neoliberal policies, but does a couple hundred dollars in savings on poorly made stuff (which is itself offset by an unmeasured decline in quality and durability) offset the fact that a huge swath of American households can no longer afford to rent their own apartment or house, much less buy a house?
Does this modest reduction in the cost of consumer goods offset the upward-spiraling cost of healthcare that is bankrupting small business and households? Does it offset the stagnation of wages for the majority of wage-earners? Does it offset the insecurity of work and benefits? Does it offset the decline of competition and the subsequent domination of profiteering monopolies and cartels in the American economy?
The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets From plane tickets to cellphone bills, monopoly power costs American consumers billions of dollars a year.
These are the forces hollowing out America: the relentless rise of the cost of big-ticket essentials while wages stagnate for the bottom 80%; the normalization of profiteering monopolies and cartels who buy tax breaks and regulatory capture in our pay-to-play political system; the decline of social mobility; the erosion of shared purpose and social capital; the silencing of dissent and independent thought; the erosion of financial security as everyone is forced into risky casinos of speculative financialization; the erosion of the rule of law as the super-wealthy are more equal than everyone else; the criminalization of poverty; the decline of small business formation; the erosion of well-being and health; and so on in a long list of landslides in everything that matters that we don't dare measure.
What's Been Normalized? Nothing Good or Positive
Most perniciously, America is being hollowed out as local enterprises that reinvested profits back into their own communities have been wiped out by monopolies and cartels drawing upon unlimited credit lines of cheap money supplied by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, a system that guarantees the top few will collect whatever "wealth" is being generated by globalization and financialization: The 1% grabbed 82% of all wealth created in 2017 (and 2018 and 2019...).
Here is hollowed-out America, an economy of ever-greater financial wealth piling up in the hands of the few while tens of millions of wage-earners can't afford what was available to everyone, even the working class, in previous eras: to buy a family home, however modest; to be able to afford to have children; to build meaningful capital; to have a positive social role in the community; to have a say in the political system; to have the opportunity to become self-employed without gambling the entire family's capital on the venture; access to the ladder of social mobility and access to the shared capital of a functional government and infrastructure.
The whole point my book Will You Be Richer or Poorer? is to contrast the happy story reflected by what we do measure-- an endless increase in financial wealth--with the disturbing account of what we're losing or have already lost that we don't dare measure lest it reveal how little is left of America's non-financial wealth.
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
SC201-3
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52574.htm
Impeach the Government: Rogue Agencies Have Been Abusing Their Powers for Decades
“When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”—Alexander Hamilton
By all means, let’s talk about impeachment.
To allow the President or any rogue government agency or individual to disregard the rule of law whenever, wherever and however it chooses and operate “above the law” is exactly how a nation of sheep gives rise to a government of wolves.
To be clear: this is not about Donald Trump. Or at least it shouldn’t be just about Trump.
This is a condemnation of every government toady at every point along the political spectrum—right, left and center—who has conspired to expand the federal government’s powers at the expense of the citizenry.
For too long now, the American people have played politics with their principles and turned a blind eye to all manner of wrongdoing when it was politically expedient, allowing Congress, the White House and the Judiciary to wreak havoc with their freedoms and act in violation of the rule of law.
“We the people” are paying the price for it now.
We are paying the price every day that we allow the government to continue to wage its war on the American People, a war that is being fought on many fronts: with bullets and tasers, with surveillance cameras and license readers, with intimidation and propaganda, with court rulings and legislation, with the collusion of every bureaucrat who dances to the tune of corporate handouts while on the government’s payroll, and most effectively of all, with the complicity of the American people, who continue to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by their politics, distracted by their pastimes, and acclimated to a world in which government corruption is the norm.
Don’t keep falling for the Deep State’s ploys.
This entire impeachment process is a manufactured political circus—a shell game—aimed at distracting the public from the devious treachery of the American police state, which continues to lock down the nation and strip the citizenry of every last vestige of constitutional safeguards that have historically served as a bulwark against tyranny.
Has President Trump overstepped his authority and abused his powers?
Without a doubt.
Then again, so did Presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, and almost every president before them.
Trump is not the first president to weaken the system of checks and balances, sidestep the rule of law, and expand the power of the president. He is just the most recent.
If we were being honest and consistent in holding government officials accountable, you’d have to impeach almost every president in recent years for operating “above the law,” unbound by the legislative or judicial branches of the government.
When we refer to the “rule of law,” that’s constitutional shorthand for the idea that everyone is treated the same under the law, everyone is held equally accountable to abiding by the law, and no one is given a free pass based on their politics, their connections, their wealth, their status or any other bright line test used to confer special treatment on the elite.
When the government and its agents no longer respect the rule of law—the Constitution—or believe that it applies to them, then the very contract on which this relationship is based becomes invalid.
Although the Constitution requires a separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government in order to ensure accountability so that no one government agency becomes all-powerful, each successive president over the past 30 years has, through the negligence of Congress and the courts, expanded the reach and power of the presidency by adding to his office’s list of extraordinary orders, directives and special privileges.
All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama and George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were inherited by Donald Trump.
These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to act as a dictator by operating above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.
Yet in operating above the law, it’s not just the president who has become a law unto himself.
The government itself has become an imperial dictator, an overlord, a king.
This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.
This abuse of power has been going on for so long that it has become the norm, the Constitution be damned.
There are hundreds—make that thousands—of government bureaucrats who are getting away with murder (in many cases, literally) simply because the legislatures, courts and the citizenry can’t be bothered to make them play by the rules of the Constitution.
Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.
It’s the nature of the beast: power corrupts.
Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a politician, an entertainment mogul, a corporate CEO or a police officer: give any one person (or government agency) too much power and allow him or her or it to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will eventually be abused.
We’re seeing this dynamic play out every day in communities across America.
A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses actors and actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs civilian targets and gets away with it.
Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sexual harassment, government corruption, or the rule of law.
Twenty years ago, I was a lawyer for Paula Jones, who sued then-President Clinton for dropping his pants and propositioning her for sex when he was governor of Arkansas. That lawsuit gave rise to revelations about Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old intern at the White House, and his eventual impeachment for lying about it under oath.
As Dana Milbank writes for The Washington Post:
We didn’t know it at the time, of course. But in Bill Clinton were the seeds of Donald Trump. With 20 years of hindsight, it is clear… Clinton’s handling of the Monica Lewinsky affair was a precursor of the monstrosity we now have in the White House: dismissing unpleasant facts as “fake news,” self-righteously claiming victimhood, attacking the press and cloaking personal misbehavior in claims to be upholding the Constitution…. Clinton set us on the path, or at least accelerated us down the path, that led to today.
It doesn’t matter what starts us down this path, whether it’s a president insisting that he get a free pass for sexually harassing employees, or waging wars based on invented facts, or attempting to derail an investigation into official misconduct.
If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.
After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history about how easy it is for freedom to fall and tyranny to rise, and it often begins with one small, seemingly inconsequential willingness on the part of the people to compromise their principles and undermine the rule of law in exchange for a dubious assurance of safety, prosperity and a life without care.
For example, 86 years ago, the citizens of another democratic world power elected a leader who promised to protect them from all dangers. In return for this protection, and under the auspice of fighting terrorism, he was given absolute power.
This leader went to great lengths to make his rise to power appear both legal and necessary, masterfully manipulating much of the citizenry and their government leaders.
Unnerved by threats of domestic terrorism and foreign invaders, the people had little idea that the domestic turmoil of the times—such as street rioting and the fear of Communism taking over the country—was staged by the leader in an effort to create fear and later capitalize on it.
In the ensuing months, this charismatic leader ushered in a series of legislative measures that suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus rights and empowered him as a dictator.
On March 23, 1933, the nation’s legislative body passed the Enabling Act, formally referred to as the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation,” which appeared benign and allowed the leader to pass laws by decree in times of emergency.
What it succeeded in doing, however, was ensuring that the leader became a law unto himself.
The leader’s name was Adolf Hitler, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Yet history has a way of repeating itself.
Hitler’s rise to power should serve as a stark lesson to always be leery of granting any government leader sweeping powers.
Clearly, we are not heeding that lesson.
“How lucky it is for rulers,” Adolf Hitler once said, “that men cannot think.”
The horrors that followed in Nazi Germany might have been easier to explain if Hitler had been right. But the problem is not so much that people cannot think but that they do not think. Or if they do think, as in the case of the German people, that thinking becomes muddled and easily led.
Hitler’s meteoric rise to power, with the support of the German people, is a case in point.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in full accordance with the country’s legal and constitutional principles. When President Paul von Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler assumed the office of president, as well as that of chancellor, but he preferred to use the title Der Füehrer (the leader) to describe himself. This new move was approved in a general election in which Hitler garnered 88 percent of the votes cast.
It cannot be said that the German people were ignorant of Hitler’s agenda or his Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, had papered the country for a decade before Hitler came to power. In fact, Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, which was his blueprint for totalitarianism, sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932.
Clearly, the problem was not that the German people did not think but that their thinking was poisoned by the enveloping climate of ideas that they came to accept as important.
At a certain point, the trivial became important, and obedience to the government in pursuit of security over freedom became predominant.
As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free, “Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.”
The German people were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”
The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.
“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”
Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”
In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”
Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.
So yes, let’s talk about impeachment, but don’t fall for the partisan shell game that sets Trump up as the fall guy for the Deep State’s high crimes and misdemeanors.
Set your sights higher: impeach the government for overstepping its authority, abusing its power, and disregarding the rule of law.
Impeach the Government: Rogue Agencies Have Been Abusing Their Powers for Decades
“When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”—Alexander Hamilton
By all means, let’s talk about impeachment.
To allow the President or any rogue government agency or individual to disregard the rule of law whenever, wherever and however it chooses and operate “above the law” is exactly how a nation of sheep gives rise to a government of wolves.
To be clear: this is not about Donald Trump. Or at least it shouldn’t be just about Trump.
This is a condemnation of every government toady at every point along the political spectrum—right, left and center—who has conspired to expand the federal government’s powers at the expense of the citizenry.
For too long now, the American people have played politics with their principles and turned a blind eye to all manner of wrongdoing when it was politically expedient, allowing Congress, the White House and the Judiciary to wreak havoc with their freedoms and act in violation of the rule of law.
“We the people” are paying the price for it now.
We are paying the price every day that we allow the government to continue to wage its war on the American People, a war that is being fought on many fronts: with bullets and tasers, with surveillance cameras and license readers, with intimidation and propaganda, with court rulings and legislation, with the collusion of every bureaucrat who dances to the tune of corporate handouts while on the government’s payroll, and most effectively of all, with the complicity of the American people, who continue to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by their politics, distracted by their pastimes, and acclimated to a world in which government corruption is the norm.
Don’t keep falling for the Deep State’s ploys.
This entire impeachment process is a manufactured political circus—a shell game—aimed at distracting the public from the devious treachery of the American police state, which continues to lock down the nation and strip the citizenry of every last vestige of constitutional safeguards that have historically served as a bulwark against tyranny.
Has President Trump overstepped his authority and abused his powers?
Without a doubt.
Then again, so did Presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, and almost every president before them.
Trump is not the first president to weaken the system of checks and balances, sidestep the rule of law, and expand the power of the president. He is just the most recent.
If we were being honest and consistent in holding government officials accountable, you’d have to impeach almost every president in recent years for operating “above the law,” unbound by the legislative or judicial branches of the government.
When we refer to the “rule of law,” that’s constitutional shorthand for the idea that everyone is treated the same under the law, everyone is held equally accountable to abiding by the law, and no one is given a free pass based on their politics, their connections, their wealth, their status or any other bright line test used to confer special treatment on the elite.
When the government and its agents no longer respect the rule of law—the Constitution—or believe that it applies to them, then the very contract on which this relationship is based becomes invalid.
Although the Constitution requires a separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government in order to ensure accountability so that no one government agency becomes all-powerful, each successive president over the past 30 years has, through the negligence of Congress and the courts, expanded the reach and power of the presidency by adding to his office’s list of extraordinary orders, directives and special privileges.
All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama and George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were inherited by Donald Trump.
These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to act as a dictator by operating above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.
Yet in operating above the law, it’s not just the president who has become a law unto himself.
The government itself has become an imperial dictator, an overlord, a king.
This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.
This abuse of power has been going on for so long that it has become the norm, the Constitution be damned.
There are hundreds—make that thousands—of government bureaucrats who are getting away with murder (in many cases, literally) simply because the legislatures, courts and the citizenry can’t be bothered to make them play by the rules of the Constitution.
Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.
It’s the nature of the beast: power corrupts.
Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a politician, an entertainment mogul, a corporate CEO or a police officer: give any one person (or government agency) too much power and allow him or her or it to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will eventually be abused.
We’re seeing this dynamic play out every day in communities across America.
A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses actors and actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs civilian targets and gets away with it.
Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sexual harassment, government corruption, or the rule of law.
Twenty years ago, I was a lawyer for Paula Jones, who sued then-President Clinton for dropping his pants and propositioning her for sex when he was governor of Arkansas. That lawsuit gave rise to revelations about Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old intern at the White House, and his eventual impeachment for lying about it under oath.
As Dana Milbank writes for The Washington Post:
We didn’t know it at the time, of course. But in Bill Clinton were the seeds of Donald Trump. With 20 years of hindsight, it is clear… Clinton’s handling of the Monica Lewinsky affair was a precursor of the monstrosity we now have in the White House: dismissing unpleasant facts as “fake news,” self-righteously claiming victimhood, attacking the press and cloaking personal misbehavior in claims to be upholding the Constitution…. Clinton set us on the path, or at least accelerated us down the path, that led to today.
It doesn’t matter what starts us down this path, whether it’s a president insisting that he get a free pass for sexually harassing employees, or waging wars based on invented facts, or attempting to derail an investigation into official misconduct.
If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.
After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history about how easy it is for freedom to fall and tyranny to rise, and it often begins with one small, seemingly inconsequential willingness on the part of the people to compromise their principles and undermine the rule of law in exchange for a dubious assurance of safety, prosperity and a life without care.
For example, 86 years ago, the citizens of another democratic world power elected a leader who promised to protect them from all dangers. In return for this protection, and under the auspice of fighting terrorism, he was given absolute power.
This leader went to great lengths to make his rise to power appear both legal and necessary, masterfully manipulating much of the citizenry and their government leaders.
Unnerved by threats of domestic terrorism and foreign invaders, the people had little idea that the domestic turmoil of the times—such as street rioting and the fear of Communism taking over the country—was staged by the leader in an effort to create fear and later capitalize on it.
In the ensuing months, this charismatic leader ushered in a series of legislative measures that suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus rights and empowered him as a dictator.
On March 23, 1933, the nation’s legislative body passed the Enabling Act, formally referred to as the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation,” which appeared benign and allowed the leader to pass laws by decree in times of emergency.
What it succeeded in doing, however, was ensuring that the leader became a law unto himself.
The leader’s name was Adolf Hitler, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Yet history has a way of repeating itself.
Hitler’s rise to power should serve as a stark lesson to always be leery of granting any government leader sweeping powers.
Clearly, we are not heeding that lesson.
“How lucky it is for rulers,” Adolf Hitler once said, “that men cannot think.”
The horrors that followed in Nazi Germany might have been easier to explain if Hitler had been right. But the problem is not so much that people cannot think but that they do not think. Or if they do think, as in the case of the German people, that thinking becomes muddled and easily led.
Hitler’s meteoric rise to power, with the support of the German people, is a case in point.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in full accordance with the country’s legal and constitutional principles. When President Paul von Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler assumed the office of president, as well as that of chancellor, but he preferred to use the title Der Füehrer (the leader) to describe himself. This new move was approved in a general election in which Hitler garnered 88 percent of the votes cast.
It cannot be said that the German people were ignorant of Hitler’s agenda or his Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, had papered the country for a decade before Hitler came to power. In fact, Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, which was his blueprint for totalitarianism, sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932.
Clearly, the problem was not that the German people did not think but that their thinking was poisoned by the enveloping climate of ideas that they came to accept as important.
At a certain point, the trivial became important, and obedience to the government in pursuit of security over freedom became predominant.
As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free, “Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.”
The German people were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”
The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.
“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”
Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”
In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”
Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.
So yes, let’s talk about impeachment, but don’t fall for the partisan shell game that sets Trump up as the fall guy for the Deep State’s high crimes and misdemeanors.
Set your sights higher: impeach the government for overstepping its authority, abusing its power, and disregarding the rule of law.
Monday, November 25, 2019
SC201-2
https://www.peakprosperity.com/the-federal-reserve-is-directly-monetizing-us-debt/
The Federal Reserve Is Directly Monetizing US Debt
In a very real way, MMT is already here
The Federal Reserve is now directly monetizing US federal debt.
Sure, it’s not admitting to this. And it’s using several technical jinks and jives to offer a pretense that things are otherwise.
But it’s not terribly difficult to predict what’s going to happen next: the Federal Reserve will drop the secrecy and start buying US debt openly.
At a time, mind you, when US fiscal deficits are exploding and foreign buyers are heading for the exits.
How It’s Supposed to Work
Here’s how it’s supposed to work when the US government issues new debt:
If the US Treasury needs to raise new funds, it announces an upcoming auction of US Treasury bills/notes/bonds.
A date for the auction is set.
Various participants bid for those bills/notes/bonds (including ‘regular folks’ like you and me if we’re using the government’s Treasury Direct program). This is the ‘auction date.’
A few days after the auction, the actual bills are “issued” which is when the money actually changes hands and the bills are live in the market.
At a later date, the Fed can buy those US Treasury bills/notes/bonds. The various holders of that debt submit offers to sell, and the Fed (presumably) selects the best offers on the best terms.
The Federal Reserve, under no conditions, buys Treasury paper directly. The Federal Reserve’s own website still maintains that this is the case:
Federal Reserve FAQ
There are two important claims plus one assertion I’ve highlighted in there, each in a different color:
Yellow: Treasury securities may “only be bought and sold in the open market.”
Blue: doing otherwise might compromise the independence of the Fed.
Purple: the Fed mostly buys “old” securities.
So according to the Fed: it’s independent, it follows the rules set forth in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and it mostly buys “old” Treasury paper that the market has already properly priced in a free and fair system.
But that’s not really what’s going on…
What’s Actually Happening
It’s now clear that something spooked the Fed badly in September.
We still don’t know what exactly went on, but the Repo market blew up. While this was a clear sign that something big was amiss, the Fed has not yet explained what the cause was, who needed to be bailed out, or why.
And it’s not going to anytime soon. It recently announced that its records on the matter are going to be sealed for at least two years.
While the Fed is ostensibly a public institution, and yes transparency should be extremely important — at least to maintain the appearance that it’s being careful with public monies — the Fed is prioritizing secrecy here.
Whatever’s going on has been serious enough for the Fed to openly lie. And not just in regards to the repo market.
“It’s not QE!” Fed chair Jerome Powell recently declared upon relaunching an asset purchase program that has already expanded the Fed’s balance sheet by hundreds of billion of dollars.
Given all the secrecy, obfuscation and lies, the Fed is now in clear violation of the spirit of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
Recall from above that the Fed “only buys Treasury securities in the open market”, meaning from other banks and financial institutions. That’s how the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is written:
Federal Reserve Open-Market Operations
Let’s walk through an example that connects the dots here.
Just know that this is but a single example out of many.
Data point #1
Each and every Treasury offering comes with an identifying number called a “CUSIP” number (referring to the Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures).
On October 31st, 2019 the Treasury Department held an auction for a series of 8-week T-bills with the CUSIP number 912796WL9.
November 5th, 2019 those T-bills were “issued”, meaning that was the actual date that they were to become active. Before that date, nobody had possession of them and nobody was earning interest on them:
US Treasury Offering Announcement
From the Treasury Offering Announcement above, on November 5, 2019, $40 billion of CUSIP number 912796WL9 were issued to the market.
It’s worth pointing out that no money changes hands on auction day (Oct 31 in this instance). It only does when the bills are issued (Nov 5 in this case).
Data point #2
Looking at the Federal Reserve’s website, we can see what they bought and when (but not for how much).
There we find that very same T-bill with the CUSIP 912796WL9 showing up as having been purchased by the Fed Nov 5, 2019 — the very date of its issuance:
Federal Reserve Operation Results
The Fed bought more than $4 billion of this CUSIP. If these T-bills were out in the “open market” they weren’t there for long. At most, less than a day before the Fed scooped them up.
Does it really matter if a big bank sits ever-so-briefly between the Fed and the Treasury debt it buys?
Maybe to a trial lawyer seeking to get a guilty client off on a technicality. But this certainly doesn’t qualify as “old” paper.
This is the Fed buying huge amounts of very freshly minted – not even a day old! – government paper using the power of its electronic printing press.
What’s the practical difference between the Fed buying this directly from the US government and buying it same day it issues from a big bank?
Virtually nothing — except the big bank probably took home a very hefty paycheck for conducting this “service” as a middleman. Later JP Morgan, et al., can report magnificent “profits” from their ”trading activities”, which amounted to little more than calling the Fed the week before and asking how many $billions of these Treasury bills they wanted.
Just a temporary middleman who, if only skimming a single basis point (1/100 of a percent), would have gotten $400,000 in “trading profits” for holding onto a big pile of government paper for less than a single day, with a guaranteed buyer with infinitely deep pockets already lined up. Great work if you can get it, eh?
But not very fair. Nor even remotely in line with the spirit of the Federal Reserve Act. Or what capital markets are supposed to be about. Or the Fed’s actual mandate.
The summary here is this: the Fed is buying US government paper on the day it’s issued.
The Fed is directly monetizing US debt.
Which means…
MMT is Already Here!
The debate over whether or not MMT (“Modern Monetary Theory” see here for background and discussion) should or should not happen is now moot.
It’s already here.
Over the past year, the US government has spent ~ $1.3 trillion more than it took in. To cover the shortfall, it had to raid the Social Security piggy bank for (another) $170 billion and tap the “markets” for another $1.1 trillion.
Annual Change In Total Public Debt Outstanding
If not MMT, what other name should we give a program where the US government spends $1.3 trillion more than it takes in and the Federal Reserve covers the shortfall by by purchasing US government debt on the day of issuance?
Does it matter if the US government issues it out of thin air, or if the Fed creates the same cash money out of thin air? Does it really matter in the slightest what the precise mechanisms are if the results are identical?
I would argue they don’t matter in the slightest.
All that remains now is to argue over what to spend all that fresh cash on.
Sure, some might like to debate whether we should be doing this or not. But the reality is: there’s little point in arguing over whether something should happen if it’s already happening.
Now all that’s left to debate is how much larger or smaller the Fed’s government debt monetization efforts might be.
Further, we might debate exactly what the government is spending all that money on. Or what the repercussions will be of the dangerous monetary road we’re now careening down.
But I’m not aware of any particular representative of mine even being aware of the situation, let alone concerned.
Conclusion
This is a very serious and extremely important conversation to have. But it’s not being had at all.
During Jay Powell’s last news conference, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve (and defender and champion of the largest wealth transfer to the rich in world history) was not asked a single question on this topic.
Nobody asked anything about the extreme and accelerating wealth and income gaps, both direct outcomes of the Fed’s policies.
Nobody expressed concern about the Fed’s secretive actions, its direct debt monetization, or its violation of the Federal Reserve Act.
The US media is toothless. I assume today’s journalists are simply too afraid of losing their jobs to speak truth to power, and have slipped into quiet acceptance of a mere stenographer’s role.
“Yes, Mr. Powell, you’ve reversed course and have started lowering interest rates again, and have resumed growing the Fed’s balance sheet via new QE. Oh yes, you’re right, it’s ‘not QE’. How silly of me. But despite those emergency measures, the economy is ‘in a good place’ and we all should be super optimistic? Got it. Yes, sir — very inspiring. Anything else?”
You’d think, given the enormous troubles that tend to follow central bank debt monetization that there’d be some curiosity on the topic, but no. No pushback from the media or Congress, direct or tangential.
Meanwhile the Fed has tossed a mind-boggling $285 billion of permanent new money into the “markets” over the past couple of months, and is conducting daily operations that put additional tens of billions of dollars of short-term money into the markets as well.
All while claiming everything is fine.
Sure doesn’t feel that way, does it?....
....
The Fed's " legal " mass counterfeiting operation, trillions of fiat currency created from nothing. Meanwhile, real wealth, resources, are in decline. For the elites benefiting from this scam, all the money they want, anytime they want it. Why should they work or produce anything of real value. Meanwhile the masses must toil at their jobs for a few bucks just to get by another day. This arrangement will precipitate increasing social unrest and collapse of the economic system.
The Federal Reserve Is Directly Monetizing US Debt
In a very real way, MMT is already here
The Federal Reserve is now directly monetizing US federal debt.
Sure, it’s not admitting to this. And it’s using several technical jinks and jives to offer a pretense that things are otherwise.
But it’s not terribly difficult to predict what’s going to happen next: the Federal Reserve will drop the secrecy and start buying US debt openly.
At a time, mind you, when US fiscal deficits are exploding and foreign buyers are heading for the exits.
How It’s Supposed to Work
Here’s how it’s supposed to work when the US government issues new debt:
If the US Treasury needs to raise new funds, it announces an upcoming auction of US Treasury bills/notes/bonds.
A date for the auction is set.
Various participants bid for those bills/notes/bonds (including ‘regular folks’ like you and me if we’re using the government’s Treasury Direct program). This is the ‘auction date.’
A few days after the auction, the actual bills are “issued” which is when the money actually changes hands and the bills are live in the market.
At a later date, the Fed can buy those US Treasury bills/notes/bonds. The various holders of that debt submit offers to sell, and the Fed (presumably) selects the best offers on the best terms.
The Federal Reserve, under no conditions, buys Treasury paper directly. The Federal Reserve’s own website still maintains that this is the case:
Federal Reserve FAQ
There are two important claims plus one assertion I’ve highlighted in there, each in a different color:
Yellow: Treasury securities may “only be bought and sold in the open market.”
Blue: doing otherwise might compromise the independence of the Fed.
Purple: the Fed mostly buys “old” securities.
So according to the Fed: it’s independent, it follows the rules set forth in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and it mostly buys “old” Treasury paper that the market has already properly priced in a free and fair system.
But that’s not really what’s going on…
What’s Actually Happening
It’s now clear that something spooked the Fed badly in September.
We still don’t know what exactly went on, but the Repo market blew up. While this was a clear sign that something big was amiss, the Fed has not yet explained what the cause was, who needed to be bailed out, or why.
And it’s not going to anytime soon. It recently announced that its records on the matter are going to be sealed for at least two years.
While the Fed is ostensibly a public institution, and yes transparency should be extremely important — at least to maintain the appearance that it’s being careful with public monies — the Fed is prioritizing secrecy here.
Whatever’s going on has been serious enough for the Fed to openly lie. And not just in regards to the repo market.
“It’s not QE!” Fed chair Jerome Powell recently declared upon relaunching an asset purchase program that has already expanded the Fed’s balance sheet by hundreds of billion of dollars.
Given all the secrecy, obfuscation and lies, the Fed is now in clear violation of the spirit of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
Recall from above that the Fed “only buys Treasury securities in the open market”, meaning from other banks and financial institutions. That’s how the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is written:
Federal Reserve Open-Market Operations
Let’s walk through an example that connects the dots here.
Just know that this is but a single example out of many.
Data point #1
Each and every Treasury offering comes with an identifying number called a “CUSIP” number (referring to the Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures).
On October 31st, 2019 the Treasury Department held an auction for a series of 8-week T-bills with the CUSIP number 912796WL9.
November 5th, 2019 those T-bills were “issued”, meaning that was the actual date that they were to become active. Before that date, nobody had possession of them and nobody was earning interest on them:
US Treasury Offering Announcement
From the Treasury Offering Announcement above, on November 5, 2019, $40 billion of CUSIP number 912796WL9 were issued to the market.
It’s worth pointing out that no money changes hands on auction day (Oct 31 in this instance). It only does when the bills are issued (Nov 5 in this case).
Data point #2
Looking at the Federal Reserve’s website, we can see what they bought and when (but not for how much).
There we find that very same T-bill with the CUSIP 912796WL9 showing up as having been purchased by the Fed Nov 5, 2019 — the very date of its issuance:
Federal Reserve Operation Results
The Fed bought more than $4 billion of this CUSIP. If these T-bills were out in the “open market” they weren’t there for long. At most, less than a day before the Fed scooped them up.
Does it really matter if a big bank sits ever-so-briefly between the Fed and the Treasury debt it buys?
Maybe to a trial lawyer seeking to get a guilty client off on a technicality. But this certainly doesn’t qualify as “old” paper.
This is the Fed buying huge amounts of very freshly minted – not even a day old! – government paper using the power of its electronic printing press.
What’s the practical difference between the Fed buying this directly from the US government and buying it same day it issues from a big bank?
Virtually nothing — except the big bank probably took home a very hefty paycheck for conducting this “service” as a middleman. Later JP Morgan, et al., can report magnificent “profits” from their ”trading activities”, which amounted to little more than calling the Fed the week before and asking how many $billions of these Treasury bills they wanted.
Just a temporary middleman who, if only skimming a single basis point (1/100 of a percent), would have gotten $400,000 in “trading profits” for holding onto a big pile of government paper for less than a single day, with a guaranteed buyer with infinitely deep pockets already lined up. Great work if you can get it, eh?
But not very fair. Nor even remotely in line with the spirit of the Federal Reserve Act. Or what capital markets are supposed to be about. Or the Fed’s actual mandate.
The summary here is this: the Fed is buying US government paper on the day it’s issued.
The Fed is directly monetizing US debt.
Which means…
MMT is Already Here!
The debate over whether or not MMT (“Modern Monetary Theory” see here for background and discussion) should or should not happen is now moot.
It’s already here.
Over the past year, the US government has spent ~ $1.3 trillion more than it took in. To cover the shortfall, it had to raid the Social Security piggy bank for (another) $170 billion and tap the “markets” for another $1.1 trillion.
Annual Change In Total Public Debt Outstanding
If not MMT, what other name should we give a program where the US government spends $1.3 trillion more than it takes in and the Federal Reserve covers the shortfall by by purchasing US government debt on the day of issuance?
Does it matter if the US government issues it out of thin air, or if the Fed creates the same cash money out of thin air? Does it really matter in the slightest what the precise mechanisms are if the results are identical?
I would argue they don’t matter in the slightest.
All that remains now is to argue over what to spend all that fresh cash on.
Sure, some might like to debate whether we should be doing this or not. But the reality is: there’s little point in arguing over whether something should happen if it’s already happening.
Now all that’s left to debate is how much larger or smaller the Fed’s government debt monetization efforts might be.
Further, we might debate exactly what the government is spending all that money on. Or what the repercussions will be of the dangerous monetary road we’re now careening down.
But I’m not aware of any particular representative of mine even being aware of the situation, let alone concerned.
Conclusion
This is a very serious and extremely important conversation to have. But it’s not being had at all.
During Jay Powell’s last news conference, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve (and defender and champion of the largest wealth transfer to the rich in world history) was not asked a single question on this topic.
Nobody asked anything about the extreme and accelerating wealth and income gaps, both direct outcomes of the Fed’s policies.
Nobody expressed concern about the Fed’s secretive actions, its direct debt monetization, or its violation of the Federal Reserve Act.
The US media is toothless. I assume today’s journalists are simply too afraid of losing their jobs to speak truth to power, and have slipped into quiet acceptance of a mere stenographer’s role.
“Yes, Mr. Powell, you’ve reversed course and have started lowering interest rates again, and have resumed growing the Fed’s balance sheet via new QE. Oh yes, you’re right, it’s ‘not QE’. How silly of me. But despite those emergency measures, the economy is ‘in a good place’ and we all should be super optimistic? Got it. Yes, sir — very inspiring. Anything else?”
You’d think, given the enormous troubles that tend to follow central bank debt monetization that there’d be some curiosity on the topic, but no. No pushback from the media or Congress, direct or tangential.
Meanwhile the Fed has tossed a mind-boggling $285 billion of permanent new money into the “markets” over the past couple of months, and is conducting daily operations that put additional tens of billions of dollars of short-term money into the markets as well.
All while claiming everything is fine.
Sure doesn’t feel that way, does it?....
....
The Fed's " legal " mass counterfeiting operation, trillions of fiat currency created from nothing. Meanwhile, real wealth, resources, are in decline. For the elites benefiting from this scam, all the money they want, anytime they want it. Why should they work or produce anything of real value. Meanwhile the masses must toil at their jobs for a few bucks just to get by another day. This arrangement will precipitate increasing social unrest and collapse of the economic system.
Sunday, November 24, 2019
SC201-1
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52593.htm
Imperialism and the Rule of Law
Watching the Trump impeachment hearings, one hears again and again the phrase, ‘the rule of law’ uttered with great solemnity. The phrase is followed very closely by another slogan, ‘fighting corruption’. The American public is told by the congressional democrats on the House Judiciary Committee that in effect, impeaching President Trump is an imperative action needed to set an example to the world that the United States upholds ‘democracy’ and the ‘the rule of law’. Furthermore, the public is told that U.S. policy in the Ukraine is designed to counter ‘Russian aggression’ and reverse the ‘Russian invasion’ of that beleaguered country. That no such ‘aggression’ or ‘invasion’ has taken place is irrelevant to democrats and republicans alike.
Several questions should be asked by way of examining the political rhetoric currently being used to justify U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine. Firstly, was the 2014 U. S. sponsored coup d’etat of President Victor Yanukovych an example of upholding democracy? Secondly, was supporting ultra-rightwing and neo-Nazi shock troops in the 2014 Maiden uprising as did U.S. senator John McCain an example of respecting the rule of law? Thirdly, was the intervention undertaken by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt into the domestic political affairs of Ukraine that resulted in the selection of that government’s pro-Western Yatsenyuk leadership in the wake of the coup an example of democratic governance? Fourthly, was placing the Ukraine in debt to the IMF to the tune of $18 Billion and requiring that the government slash its national gas subsidies thereby contributing to a 50% increase in gas prices an example of exercising the rule of law? Fifthly, is funding a war in the Ukraine that has cost the lives of an estimated 13,000 people by delivering military aid to the pro- Western Kiev government an example of the United States promoting democracy and human rights?
In effect, the answer to all of the above questions is ‘yes’ if we mean the law of the imperialist jungle. The answer is ‘no’ if we mean international and constitutional law. U.S. imperialism is above the law in the latter sense. Imperialist diplomacy is conducted by gangsters who routinely make offers to other leaders that cannot be refused. Yanukovych was deposed after refusing to take loans from the IMF. His replacement, the Ukrainian businessman and oligarch, Petro Poroshenko, had no such qualms. The popular Ukrainian actor and hapless new President Volodymyr Zelensky is left to pick up the pieces of a broken state wrecked by war, neo-liberal privatization and the attendant oligarchical corruption that flows in its wake.
Impeaching a U.S. president for allegedly placing strings on foreign aid seems rather selective as all U.S. aid comes with strings attached. It is the nature of the stings in question that are controversial. Were there strings attached to Ukrainian foreign aid? The democrats say yes, the strings involved pressure to investigate a political rival of President Trump. The republicans say no, the aid was ultimately delivered without strings attached. Neither side questions the propriety of delivering lethal military aid to a country fighting what appears to be a civil war that resulted from a U.S. coup. The reason for bipartisan congressional silence on the nature of the aid in question is that the war in Ukraine is a U.S. proxy war with Russia, not a civil war in Ukraine.
Consequently, the events that have unfolded in Ukraine and their domestic repercussions in the United States cannot be viewed in isolation. Imperialism, as the political analyst Michael Parenti once wrote, sees only two types of countries beyond its borders, satellites (or vassal states) that throw themselves open to free market neo-liberal exploitation, and enemies, or potential enemies, that do not, preferring one form or another of economic nationalism designed to protect their domestic markets, resources, labor, and currencies. Furthermore, Parenti indicated that domestically, the empire destroys the republic.
Enter the vainglorious Donald Trump who wanted to have peaceful relations with Russia. The Donald did not understand that the United States does not have allies or friends of any kind. Being an empire, it has only permanent interests and unless Vladimir Putin is willing to throw the doors of mother Russia open to Western predatory investors as his alcoholic predecessor Boris Yeltsin had done, then Mr. Putin will be regarded as an enemy of the United States and one does not have peaceful relations with an enemy. Especially an enemy that had the temerity to block the U.S. proxy war in Syria thereby disrupting the plans of the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia to defeat the ‘arc of resistance’ consisting of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.
The ‘rule of law’ doesn’t seem to be doing so well in that region of the world that Noam Chomsky once described as being animated by a ‘cauldron of animosities’. The United States actively supports the Israeli apartheid state in its ongoing deracination and vicious oppression of the peoples of Palestine; it supports the retrograde Saudi Monarchy, its Wahabi fundamentalist legions who spread havoc throughout the region, and its destructive war in Yemen; it supports the new Turkish sultan’s ambitions in Syria against the Kurds; it conducts economic warfare on Iran; it occupies the oil fields of Syria at great profit pretending to fight ISIS; and it foments social rebellion in Iraq and Lebanon. It does so to defend empire, access to oil, and Israel. None of those interests have anything to do with the ‘rule of law’ or ‘promoting democracy’ and everything to do with violence, subjugation and theft.
From the perspective of the bipartisan U.S. political and foreign policy establishments, Russian needs to butt out of the Ukraine and the Middle East and assume vassal status or the psychotic anti-Putin, anti- Russian hysteria relentlessly manufactured by the political and media elite will not end. Russiagate and Ukrainegate are transparent attempts by the national security state and the democrats to delegitimize the Trump presidency, reverse the results of the 2016 election, and, most importantly, insure the continuity established by Presidents Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama of expanding NATO and encircling Russia with hostile puppets that act as the cat’s paw of imperialism. One should study history and recognize that provoking the Russian bear can have terrible consequences, not the least of which could be nuclear war, as the eminent professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, Stephen Cohen has repeatedly warned.
Challenging the imperialist narrative on Russia, Ukraine, Syria and beyond is a necessary undertaking in the fight against plutocratic domination in American’s ‘democracy’. Peace and freedom hang in the balance.
Imperialism and the Rule of Law
Watching the Trump impeachment hearings, one hears again and again the phrase, ‘the rule of law’ uttered with great solemnity. The phrase is followed very closely by another slogan, ‘fighting corruption’. The American public is told by the congressional democrats on the House Judiciary Committee that in effect, impeaching President Trump is an imperative action needed to set an example to the world that the United States upholds ‘democracy’ and the ‘the rule of law’. Furthermore, the public is told that U.S. policy in the Ukraine is designed to counter ‘Russian aggression’ and reverse the ‘Russian invasion’ of that beleaguered country. That no such ‘aggression’ or ‘invasion’ has taken place is irrelevant to democrats and republicans alike.
Several questions should be asked by way of examining the political rhetoric currently being used to justify U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine. Firstly, was the 2014 U. S. sponsored coup d’etat of President Victor Yanukovych an example of upholding democracy? Secondly, was supporting ultra-rightwing and neo-Nazi shock troops in the 2014 Maiden uprising as did U.S. senator John McCain an example of respecting the rule of law? Thirdly, was the intervention undertaken by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt into the domestic political affairs of Ukraine that resulted in the selection of that government’s pro-Western Yatsenyuk leadership in the wake of the coup an example of democratic governance? Fourthly, was placing the Ukraine in debt to the IMF to the tune of $18 Billion and requiring that the government slash its national gas subsidies thereby contributing to a 50% increase in gas prices an example of exercising the rule of law? Fifthly, is funding a war in the Ukraine that has cost the lives of an estimated 13,000 people by delivering military aid to the pro- Western Kiev government an example of the United States promoting democracy and human rights?
In effect, the answer to all of the above questions is ‘yes’ if we mean the law of the imperialist jungle. The answer is ‘no’ if we mean international and constitutional law. U.S. imperialism is above the law in the latter sense. Imperialist diplomacy is conducted by gangsters who routinely make offers to other leaders that cannot be refused. Yanukovych was deposed after refusing to take loans from the IMF. His replacement, the Ukrainian businessman and oligarch, Petro Poroshenko, had no such qualms. The popular Ukrainian actor and hapless new President Volodymyr Zelensky is left to pick up the pieces of a broken state wrecked by war, neo-liberal privatization and the attendant oligarchical corruption that flows in its wake.
Impeaching a U.S. president for allegedly placing strings on foreign aid seems rather selective as all U.S. aid comes with strings attached. It is the nature of the stings in question that are controversial. Were there strings attached to Ukrainian foreign aid? The democrats say yes, the strings involved pressure to investigate a political rival of President Trump. The republicans say no, the aid was ultimately delivered without strings attached. Neither side questions the propriety of delivering lethal military aid to a country fighting what appears to be a civil war that resulted from a U.S. coup. The reason for bipartisan congressional silence on the nature of the aid in question is that the war in Ukraine is a U.S. proxy war with Russia, not a civil war in Ukraine.
Consequently, the events that have unfolded in Ukraine and their domestic repercussions in the United States cannot be viewed in isolation. Imperialism, as the political analyst Michael Parenti once wrote, sees only two types of countries beyond its borders, satellites (or vassal states) that throw themselves open to free market neo-liberal exploitation, and enemies, or potential enemies, that do not, preferring one form or another of economic nationalism designed to protect their domestic markets, resources, labor, and currencies. Furthermore, Parenti indicated that domestically, the empire destroys the republic.
Enter the vainglorious Donald Trump who wanted to have peaceful relations with Russia. The Donald did not understand that the United States does not have allies or friends of any kind. Being an empire, it has only permanent interests and unless Vladimir Putin is willing to throw the doors of mother Russia open to Western predatory investors as his alcoholic predecessor Boris Yeltsin had done, then Mr. Putin will be regarded as an enemy of the United States and one does not have peaceful relations with an enemy. Especially an enemy that had the temerity to block the U.S. proxy war in Syria thereby disrupting the plans of the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia to defeat the ‘arc of resistance’ consisting of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.
The ‘rule of law’ doesn’t seem to be doing so well in that region of the world that Noam Chomsky once described as being animated by a ‘cauldron of animosities’. The United States actively supports the Israeli apartheid state in its ongoing deracination and vicious oppression of the peoples of Palestine; it supports the retrograde Saudi Monarchy, its Wahabi fundamentalist legions who spread havoc throughout the region, and its destructive war in Yemen; it supports the new Turkish sultan’s ambitions in Syria against the Kurds; it conducts economic warfare on Iran; it occupies the oil fields of Syria at great profit pretending to fight ISIS; and it foments social rebellion in Iraq and Lebanon. It does so to defend empire, access to oil, and Israel. None of those interests have anything to do with the ‘rule of law’ or ‘promoting democracy’ and everything to do with violence, subjugation and theft.
From the perspective of the bipartisan U.S. political and foreign policy establishments, Russian needs to butt out of the Ukraine and the Middle East and assume vassal status or the psychotic anti-Putin, anti- Russian hysteria relentlessly manufactured by the political and media elite will not end. Russiagate and Ukrainegate are transparent attempts by the national security state and the democrats to delegitimize the Trump presidency, reverse the results of the 2016 election, and, most importantly, insure the continuity established by Presidents Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama of expanding NATO and encircling Russia with hostile puppets that act as the cat’s paw of imperialism. One should study history and recognize that provoking the Russian bear can have terrible consequences, not the least of which could be nuclear war, as the eminent professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, Stephen Cohen has repeatedly warned.
Challenging the imperialist narrative on Russia, Ukraine, Syria and beyond is a necessary undertaking in the fight against plutocratic domination in American’s ‘democracy’. Peace and freedom hang in the balance.
Saturday, November 23, 2019
SC200-15
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52607.htm
Unspeakable Memories: The Day John Kennedy Died
There is a vast literature on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who died on a November 22nd Friday like this in 1963. I have contributed my small share to such writing in an effort to tell the truth, honor him, and emphasize its profound importance in understanding the history of the last fifty-six years, but more importantly, what is happening in the U.S.A. today. In other words, to understand it in its most gut-wrenching reality: that the American national security state will obliterate any president that dares to buck its imperial war-making machine. It is a lesson not lost on all presidents since Kennedy.
Unless one is a government disinformation agent or is unaware of the enormous documentary evidence, one knows that it was the CIA that carried out JFK’s murder. Confirmation of this fact keeps arriving in easily accessible forms for anyone interested in the truth. A case in point is James DiEugenio’s recent posting at his website, KennedysandKing, of James Wilcott’s affidavit and interrogation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, declassified by the Assassinations Record Review Board in 1998. In that document, Wilcott, who worked in the finance department for the CIA and was not questioned by the Warren Commission, discusses how he unwittingly paid Lee Harvey Oswald, the government’s alleged assassin, through a cryptonym and how it was widely known and celebrated at his CIA station in Tokyo that the CIA killed Kennedy and Oswald worked for the Agency, although he did not shoot JFK. I highly recommend reading the document.
I do not here want to go into any further analysis or debate about the case. I think the evidence is overwhelming that the President was murdered by the national security state. Why he was murdered, and the implications for today, are what concern me. And how and why we remember and forget public events whose consequences become unbearable to contemplate, and the fatal repercussions of that refusal. In what I consider the best book ever written on the subject, JFK and the Unspeakable:Why He Died and Why It Matters (2009), James W. Douglass explains this in detail, including the James Wilcott story.
Realizing what I am about to say might be presumptuous and of no interest to anyone but myself, I will nevertheless try to describe my emotional reactions to learning of John Kennedy’s murder so long ago and how that reverberated down through my life. I hope my experiences might help explain why so many people today can’t face the consequences of the tragic history that began that day and have continued to the present, among which are not just the other assassinations of the 1960s but the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent endless and murderous “war on terror” with its mind-numbing propaganda and the recent anti-Russia phobia and the blatant celebration of the so-called “deep-state’s” open efforts to overthrow another president, albeit a very different one.
On November 22, 1963 I was a college sophomore. I was going down three steps into the college dining hall for lunch. (Many of my most significant memories and decisions have taken place on steps, either going up or going down; memory is odd in that way, wouldn’t you say?) I remember freezing on the second step as a voice announced through a PA system that the president had been shot in Dallas, Texas. When I finally recovered and went down into the building, another announcement came through saying the president had died. The air seemed to be sucked out of the building as I and the other students with a few professors sat in stunned silence. Soon little groups on this Catholic campus joined together to pray for John Kennedy. I felt as if I were floating in unreality.
Later that day when I left the campus and drove home, I thought back to three years previously and the night of the presidential election. Everyone at my house (parents, grandparents, and the five sisters still at home) had gone to bed, but I stayed up past 1 A.M., watching the television coverage of the vote count. My parents, despite their Irish-Catholicism, were Nixon supporters, but I was for JFK. I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would vote for Nixon, who seemed to me to personify evil. When I finally went up the stairs to bed, I was convinced Kennedy would win and felt very happy.
It wouldn’t be for another tumultuous decade before I would hear Kris Kristofferson sing
Never knowin’ if believin’ is a blessin’ or a curse
Or if the going up is worth to coming down….
From the rockin’ of the cradle to the rollin’ of the hearse
The goin’ up was worth the coming down
and I would ask myself the same question.
In the meantime, the next few years would bring the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, among other significant events, and for a high school student interested in politics and world events it was a heady and frightening few years. It was a country of newspapers back then, and I would read perhaps 3-4 each day and sensed a growing animosity toward Kennedy, especially as expressed in the more conservative NYC papers. I can remember very little talk of politics in my home and felt alone with my thoughts. As far as I can remember, this was also true at the Jesuit high school that I attended. And of course nothing prepared me for the president’s murder and the feeling of despair it engendered in me, a feeling so painful that I couldn’t really acknowledge it. At nineteen, I felt traumatized but couldn’t admit it or tell anyone. After all, I was a scholar and an athlete. Tough.
Then on Sunday morning my family had the TV on and we watched as Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald (image on the right), the guy the government said had killed the president. The unreality was compounded manyfold, and when later it was reported that Oswald had died, I felt I was living in an episode of The Twilight Zone, a popular television show at the time, whose narrator would say we are now entering the weird world between shadow and substance.
The next day a friend and I went to the Fordham University campus to visit a Jesuit priest who was a mentor to us. He had the television on for JFK’s funeral and we sat and watched it for a while with him. After a few hours, it became too painful and the two of us went outside to a football field where we threw a football back and forth. Perhaps subconsciously we were thinking of Kennedy’s love of football; I don’t know. But I remember a feeling of desolation that surrounded us on that empty cold field with not another soul around. It seemed sacrilegious to be playing games at such a time, yet deep trauma contributes to strange behavior.
Then I went on with my college life, studying and playing basketball, until the day after Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965. Those New York newspapers that didn’t like Kennedy, hated Malcom even more and were constantly ripping into him. I vividly remember talking to my college basketball teammate the next day. His sense of devastation as a young African American struck me forcefully. As we walked to basketball practice and talked, his sense of isolation and gloom was palpable. Visceral. Unforgettable. It became mine, even though I didn’t at the time grasp its full significance.
In 1968 when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was driving to visit a girlfriend and remember hearing the news on the car radio and feeling deeply shocked. I felt immediately oppressed by the first warm spring evening in the New York area. It was as if the beautiful weather, usually so uplifting after winter and so joyously stimulating to a young man’s sexuality, was conspiring with the news of King’s death to bring me down into a deep depression.
Soon the country would awaken on June 5 to the surreal news that Senator Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles the night before. Like so many Americans, when he died not long after, I felt his death was the last straw. But it was far from it. For all the while Lyndon Johnson had lied his way to election in 1964 and escalated the Vietnam war to savage proportions. Death and destruction permeated the air we were breathing. The year 1968 ended with the suspicious death in Thailand of a hero of mine, the anti-war Trappist Monk Thomas Merton. Subsequent research has shown that that too was an assassination. And while all of this was going on and my political consciousness was becoming radicalized, I became a conscientious objector from the Marines. I was 24 years old.
By the late 1970s, having been fired from teaching positions for radical scholarship and anti-war activities, and mentally exhausted by the unspeakable events of the 1960s, I retreated into the country where I found solace in nature and a low-key life of contemplation, writing literary and philosophical essays, a novel, book reviews, and becoming a part-time newspaper columnist. By the 1990s, I gradually returned to teaching and a more active political engagement, primarily through teaching and writing.
Then in 1991 Oliver Stone jolted me back in time with his film JFK. I found powerful emotional memories welling up within me, and growing anger at what had happened to the U.S. in the previous decades. Soon JFK Jr., who was investigating his father’s assassination and was about to enter politics and take up his father’s mantle, was killed in a blatantly rigged “accident.” A month before I had been standing in line behind his wife in the bakery in my little town while he waited outside in a car. Now the third Kennedy was dead. I called my old friend the Jesuit priest from Fordham, but he was speechless. The bodies kept piling up or disappearing.
When the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened, I realized from day one that something was not right; that the official explanation was full of holes. My sociological imagination took fire. All that I had thought and felt, even my literary writing, came together. The larger picture emerged clearly. My teaching took on added urgency, including courses on September 11thand the various assassinations.
Then in 2009 I read and reviewed James Douglass’s masterpiece, JFK and the Unspeakable, and my traumatic memories of 1963 and after came flooding back in full force. I realized that those youthful experiences had been so difficult for me to assimilate and that I therefore had to intellectualize them, for the emotional toll of reexperiencing them and what they meant was profound. The book really opened me to this, but so too did the awareness of how sensitive I was to John Kennedy’s death, how emotional I felt when reading about it or hearing him speak or listening to a song such as “The Day John Kennedy Died” by Lou Reed. It was as though a damn had burst inside me and my heart had become an open house without doors or windows.
I tell you all this to try to convey the ways in which we “forget” the past in order to shield ourselves from powerful and disturbing memories that might force us to disrupt our lives. To change. Certain events, such as the more recent attacks of September 11, have become too disturbing for many to explore, to study, to contemplate, just as I found a way to marginalize my feelings about my own government’s murder of President Kennedy, a man who had given me hope as a youngster, and whose murder had nearly extinguished that hope.
Many people will pretend that they are exposing themselves to such traumatic memories and are investigating the events and sources of their disquietude. It is so often a pretense since they feel most comfortable in the land of make-believe. What is needed is not a dilettantish and superficial nod in the direction of having examined such matters, but a serious in-depth study of the facts and an examination of why doing so might make one uncomfortable. A look outward and a look inward. Just as people distort and repress exclusively personal memories to “save” themselves from harsh truths that would force them to examine their current personal lives, so too do they do the same with political and social ones. When I asked two close relatives of mine, both of whom came close to death on September 11, 2001 at The World Trade Towers, what they have thought about that day, they separately told me that they haven’t really given it much thought. This startled me, especially since it involved mass death and a close encounter with personal death in a controversial public event, two experiences that would seem to elicit deep thought. And these two individuals are smart and caring souls.
What and why we remember and forget is profoundly important. Thoreau, in writing about life without principle, said, “It is so hard to forget what is worse than useless to remember.” This is so true. We are consumed with trivia, mostly by choice.
Perhaps a reason we remember so much trivia is to make sure we forget profound experiences that might shake us to our cores. The cold-blooded public execution of President John Kennedy did that to me on that melancholy Friday when I was 19, and by trying to forget it and not to speak of it, I hoped it would somehow go away, or at least fade to insignificance. But the past has a way of never dying, often to return when we least expect or want it.
So today, on this anniversary Friday, another November 22, I have chosen to try to speak of what it felt like once upon a time on the chance that it might encourage others to do the same with our shared hidden history. Only by speaking out is hope possible. Only by making the hidden manifest.
T. S. Eliot wrote in “Journey of the Magi” words that echo ironically in my mind on this anniversary of the day John Kennedy died:
All this was a long time ago, I remember
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and Death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Remembering in all its emotional detail the day John Kennedy died has been a long and cold journey for me. It has allowed me to see and feel the terror of that day, the horror, but also the heroism of the man, the in-your-face warrior for peace whose death should birth in us the courage to carry on his legacy.
Killing a man who says “no” to the endless cycle of war is a risky business, says a priest in the novel Bread and Wineby Ignazio Silone. For “even a corpse can go on whispering ‘No! No! No! with a persistence and obstinacy that only certain corpses are capable of. And how can you silence a corpse.”
John Kennedy was such a man.
Eliot was right: Sometimes death and birth are hard to tell apart.
President Kennedy’s courage in facing a death he knew was coming from forces within his own government who opposed his efforts for peace, nuclear disarmament, and an end to the Cold War – “I know there is a God-and I see a storm coming. I believe that I am ready,” he had written on a slip of paper, and his favorite poem contained the refrain, “I have a rendezvous with death” – should encourage all of us to not turn our faces away from his witness for peace.
We must stop being at ease in a dispensation where we worship the gods of war and clutch the nuclear weapons that our crazed leaders say they will use on a “first-strike” basis. If they ever do, Eliot’s question – “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” – will be answered.
But no one will hear it.
Unspeakable Memories: The Day John Kennedy Died
There is a vast literature on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who died on a November 22nd Friday like this in 1963. I have contributed my small share to such writing in an effort to tell the truth, honor him, and emphasize its profound importance in understanding the history of the last fifty-six years, but more importantly, what is happening in the U.S.A. today. In other words, to understand it in its most gut-wrenching reality: that the American national security state will obliterate any president that dares to buck its imperial war-making machine. It is a lesson not lost on all presidents since Kennedy.
Unless one is a government disinformation agent or is unaware of the enormous documentary evidence, one knows that it was the CIA that carried out JFK’s murder. Confirmation of this fact keeps arriving in easily accessible forms for anyone interested in the truth. A case in point is James DiEugenio’s recent posting at his website, KennedysandKing, of James Wilcott’s affidavit and interrogation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, declassified by the Assassinations Record Review Board in 1998. In that document, Wilcott, who worked in the finance department for the CIA and was not questioned by the Warren Commission, discusses how he unwittingly paid Lee Harvey Oswald, the government’s alleged assassin, through a cryptonym and how it was widely known and celebrated at his CIA station in Tokyo that the CIA killed Kennedy and Oswald worked for the Agency, although he did not shoot JFK. I highly recommend reading the document.
I do not here want to go into any further analysis or debate about the case. I think the evidence is overwhelming that the President was murdered by the national security state. Why he was murdered, and the implications for today, are what concern me. And how and why we remember and forget public events whose consequences become unbearable to contemplate, and the fatal repercussions of that refusal. In what I consider the best book ever written on the subject, JFK and the Unspeakable:Why He Died and Why It Matters (2009), James W. Douglass explains this in detail, including the James Wilcott story.
Realizing what I am about to say might be presumptuous and of no interest to anyone but myself, I will nevertheless try to describe my emotional reactions to learning of John Kennedy’s murder so long ago and how that reverberated down through my life. I hope my experiences might help explain why so many people today can’t face the consequences of the tragic history that began that day and have continued to the present, among which are not just the other assassinations of the 1960s but the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent endless and murderous “war on terror” with its mind-numbing propaganda and the recent anti-Russia phobia and the blatant celebration of the so-called “deep-state’s” open efforts to overthrow another president, albeit a very different one.
On November 22, 1963 I was a college sophomore. I was going down three steps into the college dining hall for lunch. (Many of my most significant memories and decisions have taken place on steps, either going up or going down; memory is odd in that way, wouldn’t you say?) I remember freezing on the second step as a voice announced through a PA system that the president had been shot in Dallas, Texas. When I finally recovered and went down into the building, another announcement came through saying the president had died. The air seemed to be sucked out of the building as I and the other students with a few professors sat in stunned silence. Soon little groups on this Catholic campus joined together to pray for John Kennedy. I felt as if I were floating in unreality.
Later that day when I left the campus and drove home, I thought back to three years previously and the night of the presidential election. Everyone at my house (parents, grandparents, and the five sisters still at home) had gone to bed, but I stayed up past 1 A.M., watching the television coverage of the vote count. My parents, despite their Irish-Catholicism, were Nixon supporters, but I was for JFK. I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would vote for Nixon, who seemed to me to personify evil. When I finally went up the stairs to bed, I was convinced Kennedy would win and felt very happy.
It wouldn’t be for another tumultuous decade before I would hear Kris Kristofferson sing
Never knowin’ if believin’ is a blessin’ or a curse
Or if the going up is worth to coming down….
From the rockin’ of the cradle to the rollin’ of the hearse
The goin’ up was worth the coming down
and I would ask myself the same question.
In the meantime, the next few years would bring the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, among other significant events, and for a high school student interested in politics and world events it was a heady and frightening few years. It was a country of newspapers back then, and I would read perhaps 3-4 each day and sensed a growing animosity toward Kennedy, especially as expressed in the more conservative NYC papers. I can remember very little talk of politics in my home and felt alone with my thoughts. As far as I can remember, this was also true at the Jesuit high school that I attended. And of course nothing prepared me for the president’s murder and the feeling of despair it engendered in me, a feeling so painful that I couldn’t really acknowledge it. At nineteen, I felt traumatized but couldn’t admit it or tell anyone. After all, I was a scholar and an athlete. Tough.
Then on Sunday morning my family had the TV on and we watched as Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald (image on the right), the guy the government said had killed the president. The unreality was compounded manyfold, and when later it was reported that Oswald had died, I felt I was living in an episode of The Twilight Zone, a popular television show at the time, whose narrator would say we are now entering the weird world between shadow and substance.
The next day a friend and I went to the Fordham University campus to visit a Jesuit priest who was a mentor to us. He had the television on for JFK’s funeral and we sat and watched it for a while with him. After a few hours, it became too painful and the two of us went outside to a football field where we threw a football back and forth. Perhaps subconsciously we were thinking of Kennedy’s love of football; I don’t know. But I remember a feeling of desolation that surrounded us on that empty cold field with not another soul around. It seemed sacrilegious to be playing games at such a time, yet deep trauma contributes to strange behavior.
Then I went on with my college life, studying and playing basketball, until the day after Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965. Those New York newspapers that didn’t like Kennedy, hated Malcom even more and were constantly ripping into him. I vividly remember talking to my college basketball teammate the next day. His sense of devastation as a young African American struck me forcefully. As we walked to basketball practice and talked, his sense of isolation and gloom was palpable. Visceral. Unforgettable. It became mine, even though I didn’t at the time grasp its full significance.
In 1968 when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was driving to visit a girlfriend and remember hearing the news on the car radio and feeling deeply shocked. I felt immediately oppressed by the first warm spring evening in the New York area. It was as if the beautiful weather, usually so uplifting after winter and so joyously stimulating to a young man’s sexuality, was conspiring with the news of King’s death to bring me down into a deep depression.
Soon the country would awaken on June 5 to the surreal news that Senator Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles the night before. Like so many Americans, when he died not long after, I felt his death was the last straw. But it was far from it. For all the while Lyndon Johnson had lied his way to election in 1964 and escalated the Vietnam war to savage proportions. Death and destruction permeated the air we were breathing. The year 1968 ended with the suspicious death in Thailand of a hero of mine, the anti-war Trappist Monk Thomas Merton. Subsequent research has shown that that too was an assassination. And while all of this was going on and my political consciousness was becoming radicalized, I became a conscientious objector from the Marines. I was 24 years old.
By the late 1970s, having been fired from teaching positions for radical scholarship and anti-war activities, and mentally exhausted by the unspeakable events of the 1960s, I retreated into the country where I found solace in nature and a low-key life of contemplation, writing literary and philosophical essays, a novel, book reviews, and becoming a part-time newspaper columnist. By the 1990s, I gradually returned to teaching and a more active political engagement, primarily through teaching and writing.
Then in 1991 Oliver Stone jolted me back in time with his film JFK. I found powerful emotional memories welling up within me, and growing anger at what had happened to the U.S. in the previous decades. Soon JFK Jr., who was investigating his father’s assassination and was about to enter politics and take up his father’s mantle, was killed in a blatantly rigged “accident.” A month before I had been standing in line behind his wife in the bakery in my little town while he waited outside in a car. Now the third Kennedy was dead. I called my old friend the Jesuit priest from Fordham, but he was speechless. The bodies kept piling up or disappearing.
When the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened, I realized from day one that something was not right; that the official explanation was full of holes. My sociological imagination took fire. All that I had thought and felt, even my literary writing, came together. The larger picture emerged clearly. My teaching took on added urgency, including courses on September 11thand the various assassinations.
Then in 2009 I read and reviewed James Douglass’s masterpiece, JFK and the Unspeakable, and my traumatic memories of 1963 and after came flooding back in full force. I realized that those youthful experiences had been so difficult for me to assimilate and that I therefore had to intellectualize them, for the emotional toll of reexperiencing them and what they meant was profound. The book really opened me to this, but so too did the awareness of how sensitive I was to John Kennedy’s death, how emotional I felt when reading about it or hearing him speak or listening to a song such as “The Day John Kennedy Died” by Lou Reed. It was as though a damn had burst inside me and my heart had become an open house without doors or windows.
I tell you all this to try to convey the ways in which we “forget” the past in order to shield ourselves from powerful and disturbing memories that might force us to disrupt our lives. To change. Certain events, such as the more recent attacks of September 11, have become too disturbing for many to explore, to study, to contemplate, just as I found a way to marginalize my feelings about my own government’s murder of President Kennedy, a man who had given me hope as a youngster, and whose murder had nearly extinguished that hope.
Many people will pretend that they are exposing themselves to such traumatic memories and are investigating the events and sources of their disquietude. It is so often a pretense since they feel most comfortable in the land of make-believe. What is needed is not a dilettantish and superficial nod in the direction of having examined such matters, but a serious in-depth study of the facts and an examination of why doing so might make one uncomfortable. A look outward and a look inward. Just as people distort and repress exclusively personal memories to “save” themselves from harsh truths that would force them to examine their current personal lives, so too do they do the same with political and social ones. When I asked two close relatives of mine, both of whom came close to death on September 11, 2001 at The World Trade Towers, what they have thought about that day, they separately told me that they haven’t really given it much thought. This startled me, especially since it involved mass death and a close encounter with personal death in a controversial public event, two experiences that would seem to elicit deep thought. And these two individuals are smart and caring souls.
What and why we remember and forget is profoundly important. Thoreau, in writing about life without principle, said, “It is so hard to forget what is worse than useless to remember.” This is so true. We are consumed with trivia, mostly by choice.
Perhaps a reason we remember so much trivia is to make sure we forget profound experiences that might shake us to our cores. The cold-blooded public execution of President John Kennedy did that to me on that melancholy Friday when I was 19, and by trying to forget it and not to speak of it, I hoped it would somehow go away, or at least fade to insignificance. But the past has a way of never dying, often to return when we least expect or want it.
So today, on this anniversary Friday, another November 22, I have chosen to try to speak of what it felt like once upon a time on the chance that it might encourage others to do the same with our shared hidden history. Only by speaking out is hope possible. Only by making the hidden manifest.
T. S. Eliot wrote in “Journey of the Magi” words that echo ironically in my mind on this anniversary of the day John Kennedy died:
All this was a long time ago, I remember
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and Death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Remembering in all its emotional detail the day John Kennedy died has been a long and cold journey for me. It has allowed me to see and feel the terror of that day, the horror, but also the heroism of the man, the in-your-face warrior for peace whose death should birth in us the courage to carry on his legacy.
Killing a man who says “no” to the endless cycle of war is a risky business, says a priest in the novel Bread and Wineby Ignazio Silone. For “even a corpse can go on whispering ‘No! No! No! with a persistence and obstinacy that only certain corpses are capable of. And how can you silence a corpse.”
John Kennedy was such a man.
Eliot was right: Sometimes death and birth are hard to tell apart.
President Kennedy’s courage in facing a death he knew was coming from forces within his own government who opposed his efforts for peace, nuclear disarmament, and an end to the Cold War – “I know there is a God-and I see a storm coming. I believe that I am ready,” he had written on a slip of paper, and his favorite poem contained the refrain, “I have a rendezvous with death” – should encourage all of us to not turn our faces away from his witness for peace.
We must stop being at ease in a dispensation where we worship the gods of war and clutch the nuclear weapons that our crazed leaders say they will use on a “first-strike” basis. If they ever do, Eliot’s question – “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” – will be answered.
But no one will hear it.
Thursday, November 14, 2019
SC200-14
https://srsroccoreport.com/the-u-s-shale-industry-hit-a-brick-wall-in-2019/
The U.S. Shale Industry Hit A Brick Wall In 2019
The Great U.S. Shale Industry Machine is finally running out of steam. What looked very promising for the shale industry in 2018 seems incredibly bleak this year. And, if the situation doesn’t turn around quickly for the shale industry, 2019 might turn out to be the year that production ultimately peaks in the United States.
There several factors that have negatively impacted the U.S. Shale Industry in 2019; the compounded annual decline rate, the massive debt–inability for shale companies to raise money, and the stunning amount of new wells necessary to increase overall production. While shale experts are knowledgeable of the typical 60-70% first-year decline rate of shale wells, not much is mentioned about the “compounded annual decline rate.”
The chart above shows that as overall Shale oil production increases, the decline curve becomes steeper. U.S. shale oil production in the top four fields hasn’t increased all that much because the nearly 6,000 wells brought online so far this year had to offset the stunning 2 million barrel per day decline from the production in 2018.
The next series of charts, from Shaleprofile.com, will show why the U.S. Shale Industry has hit a brick wall. The first chart shows the number of wells added each year in the top four shale fields:
The four top U.S. shale fields are the Bakken, Niobrara, Permian, and Eagle Ford. In 2017, the shale industry added 7,636 wells, 9,953 wells in 2018, and 5,924 wells by August 2019. According to Shaleprofile.com, there are still 82 wells not accounted for yet in 2019. So, the total for the first eight months of 2019 is 6,006.
If we look at the Well Profiles part of the chart, we can clearly see that when the increase in the number of wells in 2015 and 2016 started to taper off, overall production plateaued and declined. However, the currently well profile continues in the same trend, but production is leveling off. Now, while there will be revisions to the production data in 2019, I don’t believe it will alter the overall trend all that much.
The next chart shows the annual increase in shale oil production from these top four fields:
Overall, shale oil production from these four fields increased by 36% in 2017, 31% in 2018, and only 2% so far in 2019. Here are the totals for yearend and August 2019:
Top 4 Shale Field’s Production Barrels per day (bopd)
Dec 2016 = 3,686,893 bopd
Dec 2017 = 5,013,282 bopd (36%)
Dec 2018 = 6,573,042 (31%)
Aug 2019 = 6,729,273 (2%)
The reason shale oil production hasn’t increased all that much in 2019 is due to two factors:
Optimized Enhanced Designs of Wells
Insufficient Number of New Wells
Over the past few years, the shale industry increased the average well production considerably by drilling longer laterals, increasing the number of stages with higher pressures, and the amount of fracking sand and fluids. While this pushed production up significantly, the downside is that the decline rate becomes even more severe.
This next chart, including production ONLY for 2017, 2018 and 2019, shows that the Production Profile seems to be peaking even though the Well Profile heads up in the same trend:
Again, this chart is only showing the production for 2017, 2018, and 2019. Each color represents the production added each year. For example, the 7,636 wells brought online in these top four fields in 2017 peaked at 2,769,316 bopd in December and then declined to 727,795 bopd by August 2019. Thus, 2017’s shale oil production lost 2 million barrels per day in 20 months.
The 9,953 wells added in 2018 had peak production in December at 3,818,141 bopd and declined to 1,828,641 bopd by August 2019. What took 2017’s production 20 months to lose 2 million barrels per day, only took eight months for 2018’s production to lose the same amount.
This is the nasty side-effect of the COMPOUNDED ANNUAL DECLINE RATE.
For shale oil production to grow moderately this year in these four fields, the industry needed to add 11-12,000 wells. Unfortunately, if the industry continues with the current monthly well rate for the rest of the year, only 9,000 wells will be added in 2019, down nearly 1,000 wells from the previous year. Thus, if there isn’t an increase in the monthly well count for October through December, production will likely continue to weaken by yearend.
The U.S. Shale Industry hit a BRICK WALL this year, and if the situation doesn’t turn around shortly, we could be looking at the ultimate peak in production very soon.
....
The Shale Boom was " sold " as a solution to our energy woes, oil supply that would last 100 years or more. This idea was always an illusion, a short lived production spike that will now be fading rapidly, and along with its decline increasing economic contraction.
The U.S. Shale Industry Hit A Brick Wall In 2019
The Great U.S. Shale Industry Machine is finally running out of steam. What looked very promising for the shale industry in 2018 seems incredibly bleak this year. And, if the situation doesn’t turn around quickly for the shale industry, 2019 might turn out to be the year that production ultimately peaks in the United States.
There several factors that have negatively impacted the U.S. Shale Industry in 2019; the compounded annual decline rate, the massive debt–inability for shale companies to raise money, and the stunning amount of new wells necessary to increase overall production. While shale experts are knowledgeable of the typical 60-70% first-year decline rate of shale wells, not much is mentioned about the “compounded annual decline rate.”
The chart above shows that as overall Shale oil production increases, the decline curve becomes steeper. U.S. shale oil production in the top four fields hasn’t increased all that much because the nearly 6,000 wells brought online so far this year had to offset the stunning 2 million barrel per day decline from the production in 2018.
The next series of charts, from Shaleprofile.com, will show why the U.S. Shale Industry has hit a brick wall. The first chart shows the number of wells added each year in the top four shale fields:
The four top U.S. shale fields are the Bakken, Niobrara, Permian, and Eagle Ford. In 2017, the shale industry added 7,636 wells, 9,953 wells in 2018, and 5,924 wells by August 2019. According to Shaleprofile.com, there are still 82 wells not accounted for yet in 2019. So, the total for the first eight months of 2019 is 6,006.
If we look at the Well Profiles part of the chart, we can clearly see that when the increase in the number of wells in 2015 and 2016 started to taper off, overall production plateaued and declined. However, the currently well profile continues in the same trend, but production is leveling off. Now, while there will be revisions to the production data in 2019, I don’t believe it will alter the overall trend all that much.
The next chart shows the annual increase in shale oil production from these top four fields:
Overall, shale oil production from these four fields increased by 36% in 2017, 31% in 2018, and only 2% so far in 2019. Here are the totals for yearend and August 2019:
Top 4 Shale Field’s Production Barrels per day (bopd)
Dec 2016 = 3,686,893 bopd
Dec 2017 = 5,013,282 bopd (36%)
Dec 2018 = 6,573,042 (31%)
Aug 2019 = 6,729,273 (2%)
The reason shale oil production hasn’t increased all that much in 2019 is due to two factors:
Optimized Enhanced Designs of Wells
Insufficient Number of New Wells
Over the past few years, the shale industry increased the average well production considerably by drilling longer laterals, increasing the number of stages with higher pressures, and the amount of fracking sand and fluids. While this pushed production up significantly, the downside is that the decline rate becomes even more severe.
This next chart, including production ONLY for 2017, 2018 and 2019, shows that the Production Profile seems to be peaking even though the Well Profile heads up in the same trend:
Again, this chart is only showing the production for 2017, 2018, and 2019. Each color represents the production added each year. For example, the 7,636 wells brought online in these top four fields in 2017 peaked at 2,769,316 bopd in December and then declined to 727,795 bopd by August 2019. Thus, 2017’s shale oil production lost 2 million barrels per day in 20 months.
The 9,953 wells added in 2018 had peak production in December at 3,818,141 bopd and declined to 1,828,641 bopd by August 2019. What took 2017’s production 20 months to lose 2 million barrels per day, only took eight months for 2018’s production to lose the same amount.
This is the nasty side-effect of the COMPOUNDED ANNUAL DECLINE RATE.
For shale oil production to grow moderately this year in these four fields, the industry needed to add 11-12,000 wells. Unfortunately, if the industry continues with the current monthly well rate for the rest of the year, only 9,000 wells will be added in 2019, down nearly 1,000 wells from the previous year. Thus, if there isn’t an increase in the monthly well count for October through December, production will likely continue to weaken by yearend.
The U.S. Shale Industry hit a BRICK WALL this year, and if the situation doesn’t turn around shortly, we could be looking at the ultimate peak in production very soon.
....
The Shale Boom was " sold " as a solution to our energy woes, oil supply that would last 100 years or more. This idea was always an illusion, a short lived production spike that will now be fading rapidly, and along with its decline increasing economic contraction.
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