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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/07/19/the-biggest-lie-the-hawks-ever-sold-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

The Biggest Lie The Hawks Ever Sold: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The US is the only nation on earth whose entire economy is built on arms manufacturing and security guarantees to tyrannical Gulf states. It’s not just correct to call the US empire a uniquely evil power structure, it’s correct to say it’s impossible for it not to be.

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Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemen and proxy warfare in Syria are many thousands of times more evil and horrific than the assassination of one Washington Post columnist, but because the empire is built on that kind of bloodshed it gets far less attention.

Biden continuing the unbroken presidential tradition of courting the Saudis is not a betrayal of US values but a very normal expression of them. You either want the complete dismantlement of the US empire or you don’t. If you don’t, quit bitching about how the sausage gets made.

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The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Republicans say they will do evil things and then do evil things, while Democrats say they will not do evil things and then do evil things.

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On one hand polls say Americans don’t want Biden to run again, but on the other hand there’s zero chance Democrats put forward a different candidate who’s better than the rotbrained empire mummy.

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Friendly reminder that Russiagate was a psyop which had its origins in the US intelligence cartel, was used to facilitate longstanding agendas of the US intelligence cartel, is the reason liberals are now cheerleading the US proxy war in Ukraine, and that only an idiot would call this a coincidence.

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Anyone who still buys this schtick is a fucking moron:

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Current proxy warfare tactics in Ukraine have no chance of delivering a swift defeat to Russia. What they do have is a pretty good chance of creating a costly military quagmire for Russia and a 100 percent certainty of creating massive profits for the arms industry.

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The biggest lie the hawks ever sold was that their militaristic policies prevent the problems they actually create. Militarizing against Russia caused this war. The war on terror created terror groups. Continuing the encirclement of China will likely lead to a nasty confrontation there. Etc.

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Working to bring down Moscow and Beijing would be a great way to move toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony while simultaneously unleashing the kind of worldwide economic chaos and desperation that shock doctrine capitalism engineers have heretofore only ever dreamed of.

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At the end of this clip Bolton cites “classified information” as the reason he won’t name the other US coups he’s helped orchestrate, calling to mind when Assange said “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security”:

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1548322292375072768

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The most important job of the western media right now is convincing the public that the world’s major powers splitting into two increasingly hostile alliances is probably nothing to worry about.

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Celebrities “getting political” is not a problem in itself. The problem is that most of them don’t start growing their political awareness until they’re already famous, when they’re informing their worldview from inside an elite echo chamber that has a vested interest in preserving the status quo.

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Believing there are good billionaires is even dumber than believing there are good US presidents, and believing there are good mainstream media pundits is even dumber than believing there are good billionaires.

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The Guardian is the nastiest war propaganda rag in the world, and Simon Tisdall is the nastiest war propagandist at The Guardian.

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No one ever espouses a mainstream political worldview because they have thoroughly examined all the options and sincerely believe that one’s the best. It’s always because they don’t know other political worldviews exist, or aren’t sufficiently familiar with them, or have been propagandized into believing false things about them, or because they work in a career that is advanced by adhering to mainstream political perspectives.

This is true because mainstream political worldviews do not exist to help people and make good things happen, they exist to facilitate plutocracy and empire. Nobody who deeply investigates their nature and contrasts them with alternatives comes away thinking they’re the best, whether they’re someone with left-wing or right-wing sympathies or anywhere in between.

The only reason mainstream politics are mainstream is because powerful manipulators pour a tremendous amount of wealth and energy into making them mainstream. If there were actually a “marketplace of ideas” on that front, mainstream politics would die.

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The empire still fears the public. If it didn’t it wouldn’t bother rolling out so much propaganda ahead of all its depraved actions — it would just act. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they’re still afraid of what we’ll do to them if we decide we don’t consent.

Just something I think is worth calling to mind once in a while.

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https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/07/18/the-united-states-does-not-have-an-economy/

The United States Does Not Have an Economy

The US financial sector has long looted other countries.  A number of participants have described the process.  First a country is enticed with bribes to the leaders to take out loans that cannot be serviced or repaid.  Then in comes the IMF. Austerity is imposed on the population.  Public services and employment are cut to free resources for debt service, and public assets are sold to repay the loan.  Living standards fall, and US corporations take over the country’s economy.

As foreign governments, having experienced or witnessed the economic carnage and fearing accountability, are less willing to be bribed into indebting their countries, American finance is now applying this technique to Americans. Contrary to the narrative in the financial press, the Federal Reserve is not raising interest rates in order to fight inflation.  It is ludicrous to think that a three-quarters of one percent rise in a very low interest rate is going to have any impact on a 9.1% rate of consumer inflation or that speculation that the Federal Reserve has in mind another three-quarters of one percent possibly followed by one half of one percent comprise an anti-inflation policy.  If all these increases occur, it still leaves the interest rate below the inflation rate.

Moreover, as I have previously explained, the inflation is not monetary.  The higher prices are the result of supply disruptions caused by Washington’s Covid lockdowns and Russian sanctions.  Production was stopped and supply chains are broken.  

The Federal Reserve’s rise in interest rates is just a continuation of its policy of concentrating income and wealth in the hands of the One Percent.  Quantitative Easing was the cloak for the Federal Reserve to print $8.2 trillion in new money which was directed or found its way into the prices of stocks and bonds, thus enriching the small number who own most of these financial instruments.  Having maxed out this avenue of wealth concentration, the Federal Reserve is now raising interest rates in order to drive up mortgage costs to aspiring home owners.  The Federal Reserve is driving individuals out of the housing market in order to free up properties for “private equity” firms to purchase homes for their rental values.  That private equity firms see rental income from the existing stock of houses as the best investment opportunity tells us that the US economy has played out.  When investment goes into existing assets, not into producing new assets, the economy ceases to grow.

The Obama regimes policy of bailing out the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 crash while foreclosing on their victims, reduced American homeownership from 70% to 63 percent. The Urban Institute predicts further declines. Today homeowners’ equity has declined from 85% after World War II to one-third, leaving two-thirds of homeowner equity in the hands of creditors.  This makes it completely clear that a financialized economy indebts the people for the sake of rentier income to the One Percent.  Indeed, the financialized economy created by the Federal Reserve has reimposed a class system akin to the landed British aristocracy that was overthrown.  Indeed, we have an economically far worst class system.  The landed British aristocrats produced food that fed the nation.  The American class system produces interest and fees for the financial system.

As Michael Hudson has shown us, a no-growth economy is the end result of a financialized economy.  A financialized economy is one in which consumer income is diverted by debt expansion away from the purchase of new goods and services into debt service and fees–interest on mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, student loan debt.  With such a large share of household income spent on debt service, little is left for driving the economy forward.

If American economists were capable of escaping from their neoliberal junk economics, they would realize that “the world’s largest economy” they attribute to the United States is total fiction.  The fact is that the United States does not have an economy.  Corporations driven by Wall Street located American manufacturing in Asia so that the One Percent could benefit from higher profits from lower labor costs, while the deserted city and states had to sell their income streams, such as Chicago’s parking meter revenues for 75 years, to foreigners for one lump sum payment to solve one year’s budget crisis.  

The offshoring of American production, carried out under the cloak of “globalism,” destroyed the American economy and the tax bases of cities and states.  While the real economy declines, the Democrat Party, seeking permanent power, has imposed a policy of open borders for immigrant-invaders.  How are these millions of peoples to support themselves in an economy whose manufacturing has been moved abroad?  How can a population, deserted by American corporations, that is experiencing debt deflation absorb the costs of support and social infrastructure for tens of millions of third world immigrant-invaders?

You will never hear it from the whores in the financial press, but the United States is on the precipice of economic and social collapse.  And what are the fools in Washington doing?  The idiots are ginning up wars with Russia, China, and Iran.   

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly22/policy-error7-22.html

The Real Policy Error Is Expanding Debt and Calling It "Growth"

The financial punditry is whipping itself into a frenzy about a Federal Reserve "policy error," which is code for "if the music finally stops, we're doomed!" In other words, any policy which reduces the flow of juice sluicing through the sewage pipes of the financial system (credit, leverage and liquidity--the essential mechanisms of financialization and globalization) endangers the entire rickety, rotten structure of phantom wealth that's enriched the few at the expense of the many.

The entire notion that central bank policy makes or breaks the economy is the original Policy Error #1. That is to say, whatever policy a central bank pursues is a policy error because every policy is an attempt to manipulate the self-organizing cycle of credit / economic expansion and contraction.

The history of central banking is actually quite simple:

1. Central banks act to protect the wealth and power of those who own / control most of the wealth. This is their core unstated reason to exist.

2. To justify this absurdly transparent protection of the elite in the eyes of the public, central banks go through the motions of trying to extinguish the business / credit cycle, that is, trying to eliminate defaults and credit crunches which are the frequent but low-intensity fires that burn up the financial deadwood.

This destruction of excessive credit, leverage and liquidity is necessary to protect the forest--the entire economy-- from a much larger, out-of-control conflagration.

Central banks sell this endless expansion of financialization to the public as "we're getting rid of those horrible nasty recessions that hurt all you little folk," but in letting the deadwood pile up ever higher, central banks are only guaranteeing the eventual conflagration will consume the entire forest.

This is basically what happened in 2008-09: the deadwood caught fire despite the best efforts of central banks and almost burned down the entire forest.

Anything that constricts the expansion of financialization (credit, leverage and liquidity) constricts the expansion of the phantom wealth of elites, and so central banks are loathe to limit credit expansion. Central banks and economists need a cover story for this dynamic, and so they purposefully call debt expansion "growth": hey, look, the economy is expanding, everybody's getting richer, our policies are working!

Nice, but this isn't reality. The reality is the top few get much, much richer than the little folk. That's the only possible output of financialization, which generates hyper-rewards for those few with the most expansive access to credit, leverage and liquidity: corporations, financiers and the super-wealthy.

Every policy that protects the deadwood is a policy error, which means every policy of central banks is a policy error. The one and only useful role of central banks is to be a short-term lender of last resort in financial crunches in which the deadwood catches fire and excessive credit, leverage and liquidity is consumed.

The deadwood burning greatly reduces the risk of the forest being destroyed, but some enterprises that are not overleveraged find that they're no longer able to roll over their short-term debt due to lenders cutting off lines of credit. A credit crunch can burn down otherwise prudent enterprises, and so central banks can protect well-managed businesses that need short-term credit by being the lender of last resort.

Credit panics don't last long. Loans of 90 days are typically enough to tide over those firms who need credit lines to function.

But instead of this limited role, central banks are always trying to expand credit, leverage and liquidity under the guise of "promoting growth". All that they're really doing is expanding financial deadwood by enabling the expansion of excessive waste and fraud. Thanks to central banks, the frivolous conspicuous consumption of the central-bank funded elite is glorified as "growth," along with the complete waste of planned obsolescence and speculative bubbles that generate the illusion of capital expansion.

Waste is not growth, and neither are the unlimited expansion of debt and speculative bubbles. Every policy of central banks is a policy error with the sole exception of short-term lending in standard business-credit cycles in which credit crunches cleanse the system of the deadwood of excessive credit, leverage and liquidity as a means of protecting the entire forest from destruction.

When $100 trillion in global deadwood-debt burns to the ground, that merely returns global debt to the levels of 2012. Central bank policies guarantee the forest will be consumed by an uncontrolled conflagration. That's the cost of claiming waste and debt are "growth" and protecting the phantom wealth of the few at the expense of the many.

Want Hope and Real Growth? Let the Dead Forest of Corruption and Fed Manipulation Burn Down (October 30, 2020)

The Yellowstone Analogy and The Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism (May 18, 2009)

No Recession Ever Again? The Yellowstone Analogy (November 8, 2019)