https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/02/patrick-lawrence-the-west-technocrats-incompetents-ideologues/
The West—Technocrats, Incompetents, Ideologues
We are but weeks into the autumn, and already the new season has something important to tell us. Its lessons this past week could scarcely be more plainly indicative of the trouble we in the West are in, as those purporting to lead us wander into a future the color of an October dusk.
A terrible clarity is suddenly upon us. We approach the end of pretend, in my read.
Last Sunday Italian voters went to the polls and backed a populist party of extreme-right persuasions, Fratelli Italia, Brothers of Italy, by a wide margin. When the Italian Senate names party leader Giorgia Meloni premier at the end of October, as is widely expected, Italy will be the first founding member of the European Union to be governed by a vigorously nationalist coalition.
Britain’s financial markets—stocks, bonds, currency—swooned into something close to chaos this week in response to Liz Truss’s plans to reduce taxes by ₤45 billion, $48 billion, with no provision to fund the cuts and no apparent thought to the inflationary effects of this policy. With the pound hitting record lows against the dollar and U.K. pension funds caught with their pants around their knees, the Bank of England was forced to intervene Wednesday to protect the economy against the prime minister’s self-evident recklessness.
Following referendums in eastern and southern Ukraine this week, Moscow announced Thursday that the four regions where they were held will be formally reintegrated into the Russian Federation by way of treaties to be signed at the Kremlin Friday. That makes four new facts on the ground for the Kyiv regime and its Western supporters, for which Washington ought to answer.
What does any of these three news events have to do with any other? I am pleased you asked. These developments are not so disparate as they may at first appear. It is a matter of connecting dots. Then we will have, as in the primary school exercise books, a picture in outline of things as they are.
I have to marvel at Italian political culture. It reminds me of those eight balls children used to play with: Roll it around and a surprise message appears through a little window from the dark within. Fratelli Italia’s political bloodlines run back to the remnants of Mussolini’s Fascists. Meloni’s coalition government is expected to include two variations on the theme—the Liga, Matteo Salvini’s nativist operation, and Forza Italia, the party led by the man with nine political lives, Silvio Berlusconi.
These three share various positions. They are adamantly anti-immigration and oppose any kind of open door: It’s Italy for Italians as Meloni, Salvini, and Berlusconi see it. They are critical of the sanctions regime imposed on Russia and question the E.U.’s support for the Kyiv regime. Most of all, they are vociferously against the dictates Brussels imposes on E.U. members, notably but not only the strict, neoliberal limits it sets on budgets and public debt as proportions of gross domestic product.
You read a lot about the far-right character of Fratelli Italia and its coalition partners. This is not to be dismissed as a turn in European politics, but I do not think it is what now has Brussels and the policy cliques in Western capitals quaking. It is the euroscepticism Meloni shares with her partners that most distresses political elites on both sides of the Atlantic.
Meloni already signals she will moderate some of the positions that won her the support of voters. She is now O.K. with NATO, which she once spoke against, and she will go along, however reluctantly, opportunistically, briefly, or all three, with E.U. support for Ukraine. She no longer proposes to pull Italy out of the euro, as she once did.
But the E.U.’s prevalent neoliberalism and the austerity policies that reflect it are another matter. Meloni may speak more softly than before on these questions, but it is a leopard-and-spots question: The E.U. now has another voice that will speak out of national interests in the name of voters. The others at the moment are Poland and Hungary, but the Poles and Hungarians are post–Berlin Wall members; Italy is Core Europe, inner circle. Whether or not she intends to do so, Meloni raises the question of the E.U.’s long-term coherence. This is an excellent thing to do.
It is interesting to listen to the think tank inhabitants who reflect the Western orthodoxy as they consider Meloni’s rise to power. They worry that Meloni will “disrupt the policy process in Brussels.” They worry that she will “gum up the works.” Charles Kupchan at the Council on Foreign Relations: “The direction of political momentum is changing. We had a wave of centrism, but now it feels like the political table is tilting back in the direction of the populists on the right. And that’s a big deal.”
As to the Ukraine question, Kupchan sees Meloni’s premiership this way: “The balance of power in Europe will tilt more toward diplomacy and a bit less toward continuing the fight.” This is because parties labeled populist tend to favor a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine crisis more than “mainstream parties.” Negotiations, bad. War, good: This seems to be the point among Kupchan’s mainstream parties.
What are we listening to? What is all the fretting about?
I go back to 2015 to answer these questions. Greece was deep in crisis at that time: The economy had cratered under the weight of E.U. austerity; people were living in camps on the street and scouring garbage cans for dinner. Then they voted in a referendum on yet more E.U. austerity in exchange for a bailout. When they voted against it, Brussels and Frankfurt, seat of the European Central Bank, simply ignored the result, shoved the Athens government against the wall, and imposed the new regime anyway.
Bondholders and technocrats, sÃ! Democracy, no! This is what the E.U. had to say to the Greeks back then.
I got off the E.U. bus at that point. You had to call one of the magnificent ideals of the postwar half of the 20th century a corrupted failure. It has been clear since that the E.U. is little more than the instrument with which intolerant ideologues impose the no-exceptions rigors of neoliberal orthodoxy on those Europeans who, whatever their stripe, defend the mediating, democratic institutions through which they can express their will. There is a straight line between Brussels’ antidemocratic conduct and the rise of Meloni and her coalition partners in Italian politics.
Here we must make an important distinction. One can stand against the right-wing ideas and policies of the so-called populists in Budapest and now Rome. But it is imperative to recognize that, however they address their circumstances, they stand in defense of something worthy that is in danger.
A case in point occurred just before Italians went to the polls. Ursula von der Leyen, who incessantly oversteps her brief as president of the European Commission, warned that Brussels had “tools” at its disposal to get the Italians in line if a Meloni government took the nation in a “difficult direction.”
It was a bold suggestion that Brussels could deny Italy some or all of roughly $20 billion in E.U. funds it is currently scheduled to receive annually. This would amount to Athens 2015 all over again.
There are many things about Matteo Salvini that do not recommend him, but there are a few that do. “What is this, a threat?” he asked in response. He then accused von der Leyen of “shameful arrogance and institutional bullying” while insisting that she “respect the free, democratic and sovereign vote of the Italian people.”
I am with the incoming coalition in Rome on this point, if not on various others. Whatever else they get up to, they wage a war against the tyrannies of technocrats that must be fought if we are to find our way beyond the liberal authoritarianism that now overtakes us. Do you want to complain about their positions? O.K., but remember, it is this liberal intolerance that encouraged them.
Something to think about to round things off. When was the last time you read a news story with a Strasbourg dateline? No need to answer. The European Parliament is supposed to be the third leg of the E.U. structure: administration in Brussels, the central bank in Frankfurt, and the democratic process in Strasbourg. Forget it: The E.P. is at this point is nothing more than a pitiful sideshow of no consequence, the presence of a minority of principled members notwithstanding.
I have gone a little long on the Italian election and its implications in part because it is useful to us, we Americans, as our midterm elections approach and we try to understand what is most fundamentally at issue. In our own way and with our own many variations, the fight against the tyrannies of technocrats is our fight, too.
In all honesty, I do not think Liz Truss rises even to the level of a technocrat. Technocrats at least think, if perversely. By all the evidence, the British PM does not, I suspect because she cannot.
There were some amusing comments from the British establishment, notably but not only among the Tories, in response to Truss’s outlandishly miscalculated—or uncalculated, better—economic plans as announced last week. “Inept madness” was a good one. “A lead balloon” was O.K. In the straight-to-the-point category, there was “an absolute shit show.” I love the Brits for their understatement.
As I write there is a growing chorus in high places demanding Truss step back from her program, which amounts to warmed-up supply-side economics, the old, very old “trickle-down” hoodwinkery dating to the late 1980s: Cut taxes on wealth and corporations and everyone will get a few bits of the manna. I hope for all of our sakes she does so, as she could put a hole in the global economy’s bow if she persists.
But what led the new PM into this irrationality?
If you follow Truss’s rise in British politics, it is not difficult to detect an obsession—not too strong—with Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher cut taxes, boldly. I will boldly cut taxes. Thatcher was tough with the Russians. I will be tough with the Russians. Thatcher posed heroically atop a British tank in Eastern Europe. So will I. Thatcher wore a ushanka of elegant fur in Red Square. I’ll wear one, too.
I do not find a single feature of Truss’s public posture that does not derive from reenactment in this fashion. Aping the Iron Lady became Truss’s substitute for thinking. This way at politics constitutes a remove from current circumstances and predicaments. Decisions can be made, but there is no need for a grasp of reality.
And what you heard across the Atlantic last week was Liz Truss crashing into reality. There was the Bank of England, raising interest rates at a precipitous clip to tighten money and stave off inflation, when suddenly, on Wednesday, it announced plans to inject ₤65 billion of emergency liquidity back into the system to save Britain from its prime minister. It is what Brits call, a little rudely, a balls-up.
Truss strikes me as an extreme case of empty-headedness, but she is otherwise typical of her cohort of purported political leaders–an of a great many ordinary people, for that matter. . It is a question of “the vision thing,” as George H.W. Bush, lacking any himself, famously put it. Politicians always think of themselves and their climbs up the greasy pole, of course. But in our time this seems to be all they think about. Few, and it is hard to think of any, have any vision of the larger questions facing the people they pretend to lead.
I can think of no other passage in modern history when the nations comprising the West could so little afford blindness, indifference, and irresponsibility of this order. Liz Truss has just done us the favor of showing us where this can easily lead.
Mention of irresponsibility brings me—how could I think of anything else?—to the referendums in eastern and southern Ukraine last week and those new facts on the ground. This crisis seems never to stop spinning from bad to worse. We now have Washington and Moscow trading accusations about nuclear blackmail. We now watch as political maps are redrawn.
I cannot help thinking that, whatever President Putin’s military and political objectives as he reintegrates parts of Ukraine into the Russian Federation, he also means to poke Washington in the eye with a sharp stick: You think you can act this irresponsibly in response to my efforts to negotiate a security order in Europe that benefits all sides and there are no consequences? Here are four of them for you.
Is there a parallel between Liz Truss’s inability to think and Washington’s determination to prolong the fighting and dismiss all thought of a diplomatic settlement? Nothing too exact, but I see one. What Margaret Thatcher is to the British PM, America’s ideology of invincible righteousness is to President Biden. The latter seems to be thinking through the ever-changing circumstances no more than the former. One feature of ideologies, after all, is they remove the necessity of rational inquiry.
It is said here and there these days that Biden’s foreign policy is the most aggressive and warlike of any in the postwar era. This may be so. To the extent it is, I read it as indicative of a paralysis—a sclerosis, maybe—that has been evident among the policy cliques for some time but now grows more acute.
These people did not have to think after the 1945 victories. America had won, and the task was simply to keep on course. This changed after Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall and a new, more fluid community of nations came into being. It has changed again with the emergence of new powers such as China and post–Soviet, post–Yeltsin Russia.
But nobody in Washington had any practice in responding to circumstances changing so dramatically as these. The act of thinking had been forgotten. The resort has been to ideology and to nostalgia for a lost time.
Biden’s misfortune, apart from the ineptitude of the people he appointed his secretary of state and national security adviser, is that the music stopped more or less as he took office. It fell to him to manage the passage of American primacy into history and greet a new epoch with new ideas as to America’s place in the world. The end of pretend has landed on his watch. Biden is plainly not up to this moment, although in fairness it is hard to imagine a U.S. president who would be, given the kind of people our political process thrusts forward.
Nostalgia for an unchallenged predominance is most evident across the Pacific; it is ideology that drives the policies that got us into the Ukraine crisis and keeps us in it. Neither any longer carries the day. In both cases America is slouching toward calamity at a rate I couldn’t imagine even a few years back.
The tyrannies of anti-democratic technocrats, incompetence in high office, the blindness of ideologues: The lesson that lands so squarely upon us this autumn is that leadership in the West is now in critical decline. It has nothing to do with Russia, China, or any of our other scapegoats. Our crisis is ours alone, a rot within that reminds me of the slow demise of the Soviet Union by way of internal decay. This is the truth of events of the past week pushed unkindly before us with a savage clarity.
Comments to article:
" Thank you Patrick for you’re clear headed analysis of the situation. “Biden is plainly not up to the moment.” Great line and with him Austin and Blinken men of no vision, limited intelligence, and a virtual non-existent moral compass. It seems the west has coughed up these leaders as a result of its utter hubris in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Liz Truss a women who cavalierly declared she is prepared to engage in nuclear war. Nothing short of insanity from our leaders as Biden and ilk sleep walk to nuclear Armageddon. Hopefully, Meloni stands up to these neoliberal zombies! Keep up the great work Patrick! "
" The US is also experiencing internal rot, a disease from which few survive.
All the fingerpointing at China and Russia will not put a dent in the
problem and perhaps aggravate it by neglecting the real issues and
causing tensions to build between nations. Reform, whether social or
political is what keeps a society vibrant and developing. That has been
deferred and often killed numerous times citing other priorities. As a
result our infrastructure is failing, a large proportion of the public
is without adequate health care and the entire country does not have a
rapid rail system connecting major cities let alone small ones.
The whole nation is governed by the corporate regime thru its two branches, Red and Blue who continue to bankrupt the state by its obscene expenditures on the military. When internal problems such as illegal immigration, homelessness, opioid crisis, mass shootings etc. need urgent attention we focus our energies on quelling demons abroad that have little to do with our national security but bring us closer to nuclear war. "
" I’ve gotten some sense of the Davos agenda, which is an upgrade to the EU technocracy that you describe. One where most of us are part of the “useless class” (Yuval Harari), not needed as workers or consumers, where production is largely automated, and services and decisions rendered by AIs, for the benefit of a small elite. Will there be room for democracy, for the common good in the future? Not in the world the neo-liberal ideology takes us. How much of a future, technocratic society can the Davos oligarchs create? Perhaps in part, for a time, if a police state can be realized, where dissent is forcibly erased.
You mentioned the Soviet Union, and I think that is prescient. The
“globalist project” as I’ve heard it described, means to create a highly
centralized, controlled economy and society, not unlike the police
state the Soviet Union created. It would be a bitter irony for America
and the EU to become some form of the very societies their founders
swore never to become. But it’s easier to gradually sleepwalk into this
reality, when you live and depend on a complex, bureaucratic system as
we do today. "
....
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/28/diana-johnstone-omerta-in-the-gangster-war/
Omerta in the Gangster War
The sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has virtually announced that the war in Ukraine can only intensify with no end in sight.
Imperialist wars are waged to conquer lands, peoples, territories. Gangster wars are waged to remove competitors. In gangster wars you issue an obscure warning, then you smash the windows or burn the place down.
Gangster war is what you wage when you already are the boss and won’t let any outsider muscle in on your territory. For the dons in Washington, the territory can be just about everywhere, but its core is occupied Europe.
By an uncanny coincidence, Joe Biden just happens to look like a mafia boss, to talk like a mafia boss, to wear a little lopsided half smile like a mafia boss. Just watch the now famous video:
Pres. Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Reporter: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”
Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”
Able for sure.
It cost billions of dollars to lay the Nord Stream 2 pipeline across the Baltic Sea, from near Saint Petersburg to the port of Greifsfeld in Germany. The idea was to ensure safe natural gas supplies to Germany and other European partners by going around troublesome Ukraine, known for readiness to use its transit rights to siphon off gas for itself or blackmail clients.
Of course, Ukraine was always vehemently hostile to the project. So was the United States. And so were Poland, the three Baltic States, Finland and Sweden, all attentive to what went on in their sea.
The Baltic Sea is a nearly closed body of water, with narrow access to the Atlantic through Danish and Swedish straits. The waters near the Danish island of Bornholm where the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged by massive underwater explosions is under constant military surveillance by these neighbors.
“It seems completely impossible that a state actor could carry out a major naval operation in the middle of this densely monitored area without being noticed by the countless active and passive sensors of the littoral states; certainly not directly off the island of Bornholm, where Danes, Swedes and Germans have a rendezvous in monitoring the surface and undersea activities,” writes Jens Berger in the excellent German website Nachdenkseiten.
Last June, Berger reports,
“the annual NATO maneuver Baltops took place in the Baltic Sea. Under the command of the U.S. 6th Fleet, 47 warships participated in the exercise this year, including the U.S. fleet force around the helicopter carrier USS Kearsarge. Of particular significance is one particular maneuver conducted by the 6th Fleet’s Task Force 68 — a special unit for explosive ordnance disposal and underwater operations of the U.S. Marines, the very unit that would be the first address for an act of sabotage on an undersea pipeline.”
In June this year this very unit was engaged in a maneuver off the island of Bornholm, operating with unmanned underwater vehicles.
Berger considers that a major sabotage operation “could not have been carried out directly under the noses of several littoral states without anyone noticing.” But he adds this clever observation: “if you want to hide something, it is best to do so in public.”
In order to be able to attach explosive devices to a gas pipeline halfway unnoticed, one would need a plausible distraction — a reason for diving near Bornholm without immediately being suspected of committing an act of sabotage. It doesn’t even have to be directly related in time to the attacks. Modern explosive devices can, of course, be detonated remotely. So, who has been conducting such operations in the maritime area in recent weeks? As luck would have it, exactly the same task force around the USS Kearsarge was again in the sea area around Bornholm last week.
In short, during NATO maneuvers, some participant could have laid the explosives, to be blown up at a later chosen moment.
By an odd coincidence, only a few hours after the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2, ceremonies began opening the new Baltic Pipe carrying gas from Norway to Denmark and Poland.
The Political Significance of the Sabotage
Due to Western sanctions against Russia, gas was not being delivered through the destroyed pipelines. However, gas inside the pipelines is leaking dangerously. The pipelines remained ready for use whenever an agreement could be reached. And the first, dramatic significance of the sabotage is that henceforth, no agreement can be reached. Nord Stream 2 would have been the key to some sort of settlement between Russia and the Europeans. The sabotage has virtually announced that the war can only intensify with no end in sight.
In Germany, the Czech Republic and some other countries, movements were beginning to grow calling for an end to the sanctions, specifically to solve the energy crisis by putting Nord Stream 2 into operation for the first time. The sabotage has thus invalidated the leading demand of potential peace movements in Germany and Europe.
This act of sabotage is above all a deliberate sabotage of any prospect of a negotiated peace in Europe. The next move from the West has been for NATO governments to call on all their citizens to leave Russia immediately. In preparation of what?
The Russians Did It
In this catastrophic situation, Western mainstream media are all wondering who could be the guilty party, and suspicion automatically fixes on… Russia. Motive? “To raise the price of gas” or “to destabilize Europe” — things that were happening anyway. Any far-fetched notion will do.
European opinion-makers are showing the result of 70 years of Americanization. Especially in Germany, but also in France and elsewhere, for decades the United States has systematically spotted up-and-coming young people, invited them to become “young leaders,” invited them to the United States, indoctrinated them in “our values” and made them feel like members of the great trans-Atlantic family. They are networked into top positions in politics and media. In recent years, great alarm is raised about alleged Russian efforts to exert “influence” in European countries, while Europeans bathe in perpetual American influence: movies, Netflix, pop culture, influence in universities, media, everywhere.
When disaster strikes Europe, it can’t be blamed on America (except for former President Donald Trump, because the American establishment despised and rejected him, so Europeans must do the same). It has to be the bad guy in the movie, Putin.
The fanatically anti-Russian former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorsky couldn’t restrain himself and joyously greeted the massive natural-gas leaks from the destroyed pipeline with a cheerful tweet, “Thank you, USA.” But Poland was certainly also willing, and perhaps even able. So perhaps were some others in NATO-land. But they all prefer to publicly “suspect” Russia.
Officially, so far, no NATO government knows who dunnit. Or maybe they all know. Maybe this is like the famous Agatha Christie mystery on the Orient Express train, where suspicion falls on all the passengers, and are all guilty. And all united in Omerta.
....
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/10/01/how-to-defeat-putin/
How To Defeat Putin
I know how to stop Vladimir Putin once and for all. I here offer my strategic wizardry to the western empire free of charge.
Before I reveal my unstoppable plan, we must first understand that the Associated Press has just informed us that it is a “baseless conspiracy theory” that the US is responsible for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines which were set up to carry Russian gas to Germany, and that this baseless conspiracy theory is being promoted solely by Russia and far-right groups.
“The Kremlin and Russian state media are aggressively pushing a baseless conspiracy theory blaming the United States for damage to natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in what analysts said Friday is another effort to split the U.S. and its European allies,” AP tells us. “The Russian position is also reverberating on social media forums popular with American conservatives and far-right groups.”
“The suggestion that the U.S. caused the damage was circulating on online forums popular with American conservatives and followers of QAnon, a conspiracy theory movement which asserts that Trump is fighting a battle against a Satanic child-trafficking sect that controls world events,” AP reports.
This information may come as a surprise to the many people who are unaware that promoting this claim means they are necessarily either Russian or far-right QAnon Satanic pedophile conspiracy theorists, like for example Poland’s former foreign minister and current sitting member of European Parliament Radek Sikorski, who openly thanked the United States for exploding the pipelines.
The news that this conspiracy theory is “baseless” may also come as a surprise to those who’ve noted that both President Biden and his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland explicitly said that Nord Stream 2 would be brought to an end if Russia invades Ukraine, that the US sanctioned those who built Nord Stream 2, that DC insiders are on record saying they want Europeans to be more dependent on North American energy than on pipelines from Russia, that Germans had just been angrily demanding an end to US-led sanctions on Russia and a reopening of Nord Stream gas, that US naval forces were recently conducting unmanned underwater vehicle drills right where the pipelines were attacked, that unmanned underwater vehicles have been found carrying explosive charges near Russian pipelines in the past, that Poland literally just inaugurated a gas pipeline that will transport gas from Norway through Denmark and the Baltic Sea, that US military helicopters were recorded traveling between the two blast points and along the Nord Stream 2 pipeline shortly before the explosions, that the US empire has an explicitly stated policy of ensuring that no powers develop that could challenge its global hegemony including in Europe, and that the CIA has a known history of blowing up Russian gas pipelines.
But it’s in the news, so it’s definitely true. They’re not allowed to lie. The US is not guilty.
So if it’s a crazy Russian-Satan-pedophile-QAnon crackpot conspiracy theory to believe the US government or its imperial proxies may have had something to do with the sabotage of Russian pipelines, who did it?
Well, this is going to blow your mind because of how wildly counter-intuitive it is, but here’s the answer: Russia.
This is according to such ever-impartial and totally trustworthy experts as former CIA director John Brennan, who says that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” and NATO think tanker Alexander Vershbow, who says Putin blew up his own pipelines instead of simply closing a valve because he wanted to show the world that he is a “madman”.
“The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines further reinforces the image of Putin as madman, which might persuade some allies to push for a ceasefire and negotiations that would inevitably mean Ukraine giving up significant amounts of territory,” Vershbow told The Atlantic’s Susan B Glaser.
So there you have it. Russia, not the US empire, is responsible for destroying billions of dollars of its own economic and energy infrastructure and releasing hundreds of millions of dollars of its own gas and ending its crucial point of leverage over Europe in direct facilitation of US geostrategic interests and in direct subversion of its own, because Putin is a crazy lunatic. If it wasn’t true, they couldn’t report it in the news.
So are you ready for my brilliant strategy on how to defeat Putin? Here it is: simply stand back and wait for him to explode the rest of Russia.
This is after all the same madman who the New York Times informs us has been ordering his troops to shell a nuclear power plant they already control. If Putin is a gibbering, irrational lunatic who enjoys blowing up his own stuff for no reason other than to act crazy, surely if we just stand back and leave him to his own devices he will soon turn the Russian Federation into a steaming pile of rubble.
Honestly I can’t believe it’s taken me, a humble blogger, to figure this out on behalf of the US empire. You’d think with all the brilliant minds in the US government and the mainstream news media they’d have figured this one out by themselves, but apparently they need a little help sometimes. Any DC think tanks are welcome to call me for any lucrative employment offers they care to extend.
You are welcome in advance. Here’s looking forward to Putin’s self-inflicted downfall.
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