https://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/it-time-to-drain-the-swamp/
It Is Time To Drain The Swamp!
There comes a time in the affairs of a people when the covenants that bind them as a nation lose their force and foundation, where the power of the State no longer resides with the people and its decisions no longer reflect their wishes, but rather where power has come to reside solely in the hands of a few who, protecting their own privilege, are no longer bound by the promises and obligations of the covenant that first created the nation.
These United States of America have reached such a crossroads. Equality before the law or on the platform of economic opportunity, no longer exits within the nation. Freedom, as well, is a word now used without real sense or substance, principally describing avenues of public distraction and diversion. Justice has been eclipsed in the interests of power and prosperity for the few. When a nation such as ours becomes adrift in such a manner, awash in a sea of controlling power brokers and corporate elites, there are few alternatives open to achieve a proper redress of grievances.
The time is perhaps overdue for the people of this nation to make their stand against the tyranny of a system so illegitimately conceived, a system based so obviously upon pervasive corruption, trickery, falsehood, influence peddling, payoffs, and the rise of a fascist oligarchy. Terror is not something hovering out there that may destroy our precious way of life. Terror is our own creation, our own reflection. Or should I say, it is the creation of the forces now governing us. Terror is a direct product of our way of life — produced by, and producing, a system grounded in propaganda (marketing or promotion), fear mongering, and other modes of psychological manipulation or warfare directed at the people by our own elites.
Our imperial overreach now requires that the powers running this Nation no longer seek to control only international “competitors” over there, but rather that it continuously look to increase its control over its domestic population over here. And of course, we have seen this increasingly over the past fifteen years since the unfortunate incident at the World Trade Center. From the pursuit of Edward Snowden, and the attempted silencing of Julian Assange, to the police action against Occupy Wall Street, and the violence perpetrated against the North Dakota Pipeline Access protests ~ including attempts to intimidate Jill Stein, Amy Goodman, and other journalists, freedom of speech has become one of the principal victims in this rise of authoritarianism across the land. Only speech that can be paid for with hard, cold cash works as we have seen increasingly since the Citizen’s United decision.
The cynicism accompanying such a perspective is virally evident in the current election cycle, and specifically as represented in the person of Hillary Clinton. Here we find the profoundest cynicism parading around as political correctness and self-righteousness fronting for a hidden and simmering loathing of the Other, the plebiscite. The obverse of such a person is the raw rhetoric and associated repulsive-attractiveness of a Donald Trump. It is Nietzsche’s Ubermensch v. Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert. Perhaps, as the Republican nominee himself recently stated, quoting George Bush, “It is time to drain the swamp.”
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
Monday, October 24, 2016
SC137-6
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-10-16/deepwater-horizon-and-our-emerging-normal-catastrophes
Deepwater Horizon and our emerging 'normal' catastrophes
While watching the recently released film "Deepwater Horizon" about the catastrophic well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that caused the largest oil spill in U.S. history, I remembered the term "fail-dangerous," a term I first encountered in correspondence with a risk consultant for the oil and gas industry.
We've all heard the term "fail-safe" before. Fail-safe systems are designed to shut down benignly in case of failure. Fail-dangerous systems include airliners which don't merely halt in place benignly when their engines fail, but crash on the ground in a ball of fire.
For fail-dangerous systems, we believe that failure is either unlikely or that the redundancy that we've build into the system will be sufficient to avert failure or at least minimize damage. Hence, the large amount of money spent on airline safety. This all seems very rational.
But in a highly complex technical society made up of highly complex subsystems such as the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig, we should not be so sanguine about our ability to judge risk. On the day the offshore rig blew up, executives from both oil giant BP and Transocean (which owned and operated the rig on behalf of BP) were aboard to celebrate seven years without a lost time incident, an exemplary record. They assumed that this record was the product of vigilance rather than luck.
And, contrary to what the film portrays, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was years in the making as BP and Transocean created a culture that normalized behaviors and decision-making which brought about not an unavoidable tragedy, but rather what is now termed a "normal accident"--a product of normal decisions by people who were following accepted procedures and routines.
Today, we live in a society full of "normal accidents" waiting to happen that will be far more catastrophic than the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. One of those "accidents" is already in progress, and it's called climate change.
People in societies around the globe are doing what they are supposed to be doing, what they routinely do, to stay alive, produce and enjoy what they produce. They do not think of themselves as doing something which is bringing about the biggest "accident" of our time, climate change. No one set out to change the climate. And yet, this is the result of our normalized behavior.
Climate change still appears to many to be building slowly. This summer was hotter than last summer and the one before that. But we've coped. We stay inside in air-conditioning on especially hot days--ironically so, as the fossil fuels making the electricity for the air-conditioner are adding to the warming itself.
It is as if we are all on the Deepwater Horizon just doing our jobs. We notice there are a few things wrong. But, we've dealt with them before, and we can deal with them again. The failures and the breakdowns are accepted as just part of how we do business. And we've managed to avoid anything truly bad up to now. So, we conclude, we must be doing things safely.
Part of the normalization of our response to climate change is the spread of renewable power sources. I have long supported the rapid deployment of renewable power, suggesting that we need the equivalent of a warlike footing to deploy enough to bring about serious declines in fossil fuel use. And, while renewable energy is growing by leaps and bounds, it is not growing nearly fast enough to meet the challenges of climate change.
And yet, society at large has relaxed into the idea--promoted by the industry--that renewable energy is well on its way to creating a renewable energy society despite the fact that more than 80 percent of our energy still comes from fossil fuels. We have normalized this response as adequate in the public mind. There remains no generalized alarm about climate change.
Certainly, there are scientists, activists and others who are genuinely alarmed and believe we are not moving nearly fast enough. But this alarm has not translated into aggressive policy responses.
The argument that things have worked just fine in the past so there is no reason to believe they won't work out in the future is a well-worn one. And, it seems to be valid because so many people say it is. (Steven Colbert might even say that this assertion has a certain "truthiness" to it.)
But there is a reason that financial prospectuses say that past performance is no guarantee of future results. Likewise, no bad accidents in the past are not a guarantee of no bad accidents in the future. It is in the structure of how we behave that the risks build. The tipping point finally reveals that we have been doing risky things all along.
If you play Russian roulette with a gun having 100 chambers, you won't think that skill had anything to do with the fact that you aren't dead after five pulls. But if you don't know you are playing Russian roulette (hidden dangers with hidden connections), then the fact that you aren't dead after 50 pulls (50 repetitions of the hidden dangerous conduct) won't seem like luck, but simply the result of sound procedure.
Climate change, of course, isn't the only place where we have normalized procedures which appear to be reducing risk, when, in fact, we are increasing it. Our monocrop farms and the small variety of major crops grown on them using modern industrial farming methods are supposed to reduce the risk of major crop losses and thus of famine. In fact, these methods are depleting the soil and undermining its fertility in ways that will ultimately lower farm productivity. And monocrop farming is an invitation to widespread crop loss. Polyculture tends to prevent the spread of devastating plant diseases while monoculture tends to promote that spread.
We can talk about the normalization of industrial fishing as well. It is designed to increase our harvest of food to feed growing human populations thereby reducing our risk of food shortages and giving us another source of nutrition. In fact, industrial fishing practices are threatening the viability of practically every fishery around the world.
In addition, temporarily cheap oil and natural gas are lulling us into a complacency about our energy supplies. Energy depletion that just two years ago seemed to be indicated by high prices is rarely discussed now. We are projecting the current moment into the future and believing that the rising energy price trend of the last 15 years is meaningless.
Practically everything we do to reduce risks to human populations now creates broader, longer term risks that could turn catastrophic. The Slate article linked above references the "high-reliability organization." Such organizations which seek to avoid catastrophic failures share certain common characteristics:
1) Preoccupation with failure: To avoid failure we must look for it and be sensitive to early signs of failure.
2) Reluctance to simplify: Labels and clichés can stop one from looking further into the events.
3) Sensitivity to operations: Systems are not static and linear but rather dynamic and nonlinear in nature. As a result it becomes difficult to know how one area of the organization’s operations will act compared to another part.
For our global system as a whole to act like a high-reliability organization, we would have to turn away from technopian narratives that tell us we will always come up with a new technology that will solve our problems including climate change--while forcing us to change our lives very little.
Instead, we would anticipate and scan for possible failure, no matter how small, to give us warning about perils to our survival. There are plenty of signs flashing warnings to us, but we have not fully comprehended their gravity.
When it comes to energy supplies, we are often faced with the simplifying assertions as mentioned above that are designed to prevent us from examining the topic. People in the oil industry like to say that the "resource is huge." They don't tell you that "resource" simply refers to what is thought--on sketchy evidence--to be in the ground. What is actually available to us is a tiny fraction of the resource at today's prices and level of technology.
The effects of the recent bankruptcy of one of the world's largest ocean freight companies have given us a window into the outsized effects of a failure of just a small portion of our complex system of worldwide logistics.
If we had run our society as a high-reliability organization, we would have heeded warnings made decades ago. I like to tell people that the American public first learned that oil was a finite resource when Clark Gable told them so near the end of the 1940 film "Boom Town," a remarkable speech for the time.
American leadership found out that we would have to make a transition to a non-fossil fuel economy way back in 1954 in Harrison Brown's widely read The Challenge of Man's Future--and, that such a transition would be fraught with peril if not begun early enough.
Other warnings included Limits to Growth in 1972, a book widely misunderstood as predicting rather than modeling our predicament. More recently there was Jared Diamond's Collapse.
In general, what we as a society have chosen to do is to create narratives of invincibility, rather than heed these warnings. We are, in effect, normalizing highly risky behavior.
Perhaps our biggest failure is noted in item three above. We think of the world we live in as static and linear rather than dynamic and nonlinear. That has given us a false sense that things move gradually and predictably in our world, the same false sense that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Deepwater Horizon and our emerging 'normal' catastrophes
While watching the recently released film "Deepwater Horizon" about the catastrophic well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that caused the largest oil spill in U.S. history, I remembered the term "fail-dangerous," a term I first encountered in correspondence with a risk consultant for the oil and gas industry.
We've all heard the term "fail-safe" before. Fail-safe systems are designed to shut down benignly in case of failure. Fail-dangerous systems include airliners which don't merely halt in place benignly when their engines fail, but crash on the ground in a ball of fire.
For fail-dangerous systems, we believe that failure is either unlikely or that the redundancy that we've build into the system will be sufficient to avert failure or at least minimize damage. Hence, the large amount of money spent on airline safety. This all seems very rational.
But in a highly complex technical society made up of highly complex subsystems such as the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig, we should not be so sanguine about our ability to judge risk. On the day the offshore rig blew up, executives from both oil giant BP and Transocean (which owned and operated the rig on behalf of BP) were aboard to celebrate seven years without a lost time incident, an exemplary record. They assumed that this record was the product of vigilance rather than luck.
And, contrary to what the film portrays, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was years in the making as BP and Transocean created a culture that normalized behaviors and decision-making which brought about not an unavoidable tragedy, but rather what is now termed a "normal accident"--a product of normal decisions by people who were following accepted procedures and routines.
Today, we live in a society full of "normal accidents" waiting to happen that will be far more catastrophic than the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. One of those "accidents" is already in progress, and it's called climate change.
People in societies around the globe are doing what they are supposed to be doing, what they routinely do, to stay alive, produce and enjoy what they produce. They do not think of themselves as doing something which is bringing about the biggest "accident" of our time, climate change. No one set out to change the climate. And yet, this is the result of our normalized behavior.
Climate change still appears to many to be building slowly. This summer was hotter than last summer and the one before that. But we've coped. We stay inside in air-conditioning on especially hot days--ironically so, as the fossil fuels making the electricity for the air-conditioner are adding to the warming itself.
It is as if we are all on the Deepwater Horizon just doing our jobs. We notice there are a few things wrong. But, we've dealt with them before, and we can deal with them again. The failures and the breakdowns are accepted as just part of how we do business. And we've managed to avoid anything truly bad up to now. So, we conclude, we must be doing things safely.
Part of the normalization of our response to climate change is the spread of renewable power sources. I have long supported the rapid deployment of renewable power, suggesting that we need the equivalent of a warlike footing to deploy enough to bring about serious declines in fossil fuel use. And, while renewable energy is growing by leaps and bounds, it is not growing nearly fast enough to meet the challenges of climate change.
And yet, society at large has relaxed into the idea--promoted by the industry--that renewable energy is well on its way to creating a renewable energy society despite the fact that more than 80 percent of our energy still comes from fossil fuels. We have normalized this response as adequate in the public mind. There remains no generalized alarm about climate change.
Certainly, there are scientists, activists and others who are genuinely alarmed and believe we are not moving nearly fast enough. But this alarm has not translated into aggressive policy responses.
The argument that things have worked just fine in the past so there is no reason to believe they won't work out in the future is a well-worn one. And, it seems to be valid because so many people say it is. (Steven Colbert might even say that this assertion has a certain "truthiness" to it.)
But there is a reason that financial prospectuses say that past performance is no guarantee of future results. Likewise, no bad accidents in the past are not a guarantee of no bad accidents in the future. It is in the structure of how we behave that the risks build. The tipping point finally reveals that we have been doing risky things all along.
If you play Russian roulette with a gun having 100 chambers, you won't think that skill had anything to do with the fact that you aren't dead after five pulls. But if you don't know you are playing Russian roulette (hidden dangers with hidden connections), then the fact that you aren't dead after 50 pulls (50 repetitions of the hidden dangerous conduct) won't seem like luck, but simply the result of sound procedure.
Climate change, of course, isn't the only place where we have normalized procedures which appear to be reducing risk, when, in fact, we are increasing it. Our monocrop farms and the small variety of major crops grown on them using modern industrial farming methods are supposed to reduce the risk of major crop losses and thus of famine. In fact, these methods are depleting the soil and undermining its fertility in ways that will ultimately lower farm productivity. And monocrop farming is an invitation to widespread crop loss. Polyculture tends to prevent the spread of devastating plant diseases while monoculture tends to promote that spread.
We can talk about the normalization of industrial fishing as well. It is designed to increase our harvest of food to feed growing human populations thereby reducing our risk of food shortages and giving us another source of nutrition. In fact, industrial fishing practices are threatening the viability of practically every fishery around the world.
In addition, temporarily cheap oil and natural gas are lulling us into a complacency about our energy supplies. Energy depletion that just two years ago seemed to be indicated by high prices is rarely discussed now. We are projecting the current moment into the future and believing that the rising energy price trend of the last 15 years is meaningless.
Practically everything we do to reduce risks to human populations now creates broader, longer term risks that could turn catastrophic. The Slate article linked above references the "high-reliability organization." Such organizations which seek to avoid catastrophic failures share certain common characteristics:
1) Preoccupation with failure: To avoid failure we must look for it and be sensitive to early signs of failure.
2) Reluctance to simplify: Labels and clichés can stop one from looking further into the events.
3) Sensitivity to operations: Systems are not static and linear but rather dynamic and nonlinear in nature. As a result it becomes difficult to know how one area of the organization’s operations will act compared to another part.
For our global system as a whole to act like a high-reliability organization, we would have to turn away from technopian narratives that tell us we will always come up with a new technology that will solve our problems including climate change--while forcing us to change our lives very little.
Instead, we would anticipate and scan for possible failure, no matter how small, to give us warning about perils to our survival. There are plenty of signs flashing warnings to us, but we have not fully comprehended their gravity.
When it comes to energy supplies, we are often faced with the simplifying assertions as mentioned above that are designed to prevent us from examining the topic. People in the oil industry like to say that the "resource is huge." They don't tell you that "resource" simply refers to what is thought--on sketchy evidence--to be in the ground. What is actually available to us is a tiny fraction of the resource at today's prices and level of technology.
The effects of the recent bankruptcy of one of the world's largest ocean freight companies have given us a window into the outsized effects of a failure of just a small portion of our complex system of worldwide logistics.
If we had run our society as a high-reliability organization, we would have heeded warnings made decades ago. I like to tell people that the American public first learned that oil was a finite resource when Clark Gable told them so near the end of the 1940 film "Boom Town," a remarkable speech for the time.
American leadership found out that we would have to make a transition to a non-fossil fuel economy way back in 1954 in Harrison Brown's widely read The Challenge of Man's Future--and, that such a transition would be fraught with peril if not begun early enough.
Other warnings included Limits to Growth in 1972, a book widely misunderstood as predicting rather than modeling our predicament. More recently there was Jared Diamond's Collapse.
In general, what we as a society have chosen to do is to create narratives of invincibility, rather than heed these warnings. We are, in effect, normalizing highly risky behavior.
Perhaps our biggest failure is noted in item three above. We think of the world we live in as static and linear rather than dynamic and nonlinear. That has given us a false sense that things move gradually and predictably in our world, the same false sense that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Sunday, October 16, 2016
SC137-5
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/donald_trump_the_dress_rehearsal_for_fascism_20161016
Donald Trump: The Dress Rehearsal for Fascism
Americans are not offered major-party candidates who have opposing political ideologies or ideas. We are presented only with manufactured political personalities. We vote for the candidate who makes us “feel” good about him or her. Campaigns are entertainment and commercial vehicles to raise billions in advertising revenue for corporations. The candidate who can provide the best show gets the most coverage. The personal brand is paramount. It takes precedence over ideas, truth, integrity and the common good. This cult of the self, which defines our politics and our culture, contains the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation, and incapacity for remorse or guilt. Donald Trump has these characteristics. So does Hillary Clinton.
Our system of inverted totalitarianism has within it the seeds of an overt or classical fascism. The more that political discourse becomes exclusively bombastic and a form of spectacle, the more that emotional euphoria is substituted for political thought and the more that violence is the primary form of social control, the more we move toward a Christianized fascism.
Last week’s presidential debate in St. Louis was only a few degrees removed from the Jerry Springer TV show—the angry row of women sexually abused or assaulted by Bill Clinton, the fuming Trump pacing the stage with a threatening posture, the sheeplike and carefully selected audience that provided the thin veneer of a democratic debate while four multimillionaires—Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper, Clinton and Trump—squabbled like spoiled schoolchildren.
The Clinton campaign, aware that the policy differences between her and a candidate such as Jeb Bush were minuscule, plotted during the primaries to elevate the fringe Republican candidates—especially Trump. To the Democratic strategists, a match between Clinton and Trump seemed made in heaven. Trump, with his “brain trust” of Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, would make Clinton look like a savior.
A memo addressed to the Democratic National Committee under the heading “Our Goals & Strategy” was part of the trove of John Podesta emails released this month by WikiLeaks.
“Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to the majority of the electorate. We have outlined three strategies to obtain our goal …,” it reads.
The memo names Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Ben Carson as candidates, or what the memo calls “Pied Piper” candidates who could push mainstream candidates closer to the positions embraced by the lunatic right. “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.”
The elites of the two ruling parties, who have united behind Clinton, are playing a very dangerous game. The intellectual and political vacuum caused by the United States’ species of anti-politics, or what the writer Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics,” leaves candidates, all of whom serve the interests of the corporate state, seeking to exaggerate what Sigmund Freud termed “the narcissism of small differences.”
However, this battle between small differences, largely defined by the culture wars, no longer works with large segments of the population. The insurgencies of Trump and Bernie Sanders are evidence of a breakdown of these forms of social control. There is a vague realization among Americans that we have undergone a corporate coup. People are angry about being lied to and fleeced by the elites. They are tired of being impotent. Trump, to many of his most fervent supporters, is a huge middle finger to a corporate establishment that has ruined their lives and the lives of their children. And if Trump, or some other bombastic idiot, is the only vehicle they have to defy the system, they will use him.
The elites, including many in the corporate press, must increasingly give political legitimacy to goons and imbeciles in a desperate battle to salvage their own legitimacy. But the more these elites pillage and loot, and the more they cast citizens aside as human refuse, the more the goons and imbeciles become actual alternatives. The corporate capitalists would prefer the civilized mask of a Hillary Clinton. But they also know that police states and fascist states will not impede their profits; indeed in such a state the capitalists will be more robust in breaking the attempts of the working class to organize for decent wages and working conditions. Citibank, Raytheon and Goldman Sachs will adapt. Capitalism functions very well without democracy.
In the 1990s I watched an impotent, nominally democratic liberal elite in the former Yugoslavia fail to understand and act against the population’s profound economic distress. The fringe demagogues whom the political and educated elites dismissed as buffoons—Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudman—rode an anti-liberal tide to power.
The political elites in Yugoslavia at first thought the nationalist cranks and lunatics, who amassed enough support to be given secondary positions of power, could be contained. This mistake was as misguided as Franz von Papen’s assurances that when the uncouth Austrian Adolf Hitler was appointed the German chancellor in January 1933 the Nazi leader would be easily manipulated. Any system of prolonged political paralysis and failed liberalism vomits up monsters. And the longer we remain in a state of political paralysis—especially as we stumble toward another financial collapse—the more certain it becomes that these monsters will take power.
Fascism, at its core, is an amorphous and incoherent ideology that perpetuates itself by celebrating a grotesque hypermasculinity, elements of which are captured in Trump’s misogyny. It allows disenfranchised people to feel a sense of power and to have their rage sanctified. It takes a politically marginalized and depoliticized population and mobilizes it around a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance and an anointed political savior. It is always militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy and replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as diseased enemies that must be physically purged to restore the health of nation.
Many of these ideological elements are already part of our system of inverted totalitarianism. But inverted totalitarianism, as Sheldon Wolin wrote, disclaims its identity to pay homage to a democracy that in reality has ceased to function. It is characterized by the anonymity of the corporate centers of power. It seeks to keep the population passive and demobilized. I asked Wolin shortly before he died in 2015 that if the two major forms of social control he cited—access to easy and cheap credit and inexpensive, mass-produced consumer products—were no longer available would we see the rise of a more classical form of fascism. He said this would indeed become a possibility.
Bill Clinton transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. He pushed the Republican Party so far to the right it became insane. Hillary Clinton is Mitt Romney in drag. She and the Democratic Party embrace policies—endless war, the security and surveillance state, neoliberalism, austerity, deregulation, new trade agreements and deindustrialization—that are embraced by the Republican elites. Clinton in office will continue the neoliberal assault on the poor and the working poor, and increasingly the middle class, that has defined the corporate state since the Reagan administration. She will do so while speaking in the cloying and hypocritical rhetoric of compassion that masks the cruelty of corporate capitalism.
The Democratic and Republican parties may be able to disappear Trump, but they won’t disappear the phenomena that gave rise to Trump. And unless the downward spiral is reversed—unless the half of the country now living in poverty is lifted out of poverty—the cynical game the elites are playing will backfire. Out of the morass will appear a genuine “Christian” fascist endowed with political skill, intelligence, self-discipline, ruthlessness and charisma. The monster the elites will again unwittingly elevate, as a foil to keep themselves in power, will consume them. There would be some justice in this if we did not all have to pay.
Donald Trump: The Dress Rehearsal for Fascism
Americans are not offered major-party candidates who have opposing political ideologies or ideas. We are presented only with manufactured political personalities. We vote for the candidate who makes us “feel” good about him or her. Campaigns are entertainment and commercial vehicles to raise billions in advertising revenue for corporations. The candidate who can provide the best show gets the most coverage. The personal brand is paramount. It takes precedence over ideas, truth, integrity and the common good. This cult of the self, which defines our politics and our culture, contains the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation, and incapacity for remorse or guilt. Donald Trump has these characteristics. So does Hillary Clinton.
Our system of inverted totalitarianism has within it the seeds of an overt or classical fascism. The more that political discourse becomes exclusively bombastic and a form of spectacle, the more that emotional euphoria is substituted for political thought and the more that violence is the primary form of social control, the more we move toward a Christianized fascism.
Last week’s presidential debate in St. Louis was only a few degrees removed from the Jerry Springer TV show—the angry row of women sexually abused or assaulted by Bill Clinton, the fuming Trump pacing the stage with a threatening posture, the sheeplike and carefully selected audience that provided the thin veneer of a democratic debate while four multimillionaires—Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper, Clinton and Trump—squabbled like spoiled schoolchildren.
The Clinton campaign, aware that the policy differences between her and a candidate such as Jeb Bush were minuscule, plotted during the primaries to elevate the fringe Republican candidates—especially Trump. To the Democratic strategists, a match between Clinton and Trump seemed made in heaven. Trump, with his “brain trust” of Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, would make Clinton look like a savior.
A memo addressed to the Democratic National Committee under the heading “Our Goals & Strategy” was part of the trove of John Podesta emails released this month by WikiLeaks.
“Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to the majority of the electorate. We have outlined three strategies to obtain our goal …,” it reads.
The memo names Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Ben Carson as candidates, or what the memo calls “Pied Piper” candidates who could push mainstream candidates closer to the positions embraced by the lunatic right. “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.”
The elites of the two ruling parties, who have united behind Clinton, are playing a very dangerous game. The intellectual and political vacuum caused by the United States’ species of anti-politics, or what the writer Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics,” leaves candidates, all of whom serve the interests of the corporate state, seeking to exaggerate what Sigmund Freud termed “the narcissism of small differences.”
However, this battle between small differences, largely defined by the culture wars, no longer works with large segments of the population. The insurgencies of Trump and Bernie Sanders are evidence of a breakdown of these forms of social control. There is a vague realization among Americans that we have undergone a corporate coup. People are angry about being lied to and fleeced by the elites. They are tired of being impotent. Trump, to many of his most fervent supporters, is a huge middle finger to a corporate establishment that has ruined their lives and the lives of their children. And if Trump, or some other bombastic idiot, is the only vehicle they have to defy the system, they will use him.
The elites, including many in the corporate press, must increasingly give political legitimacy to goons and imbeciles in a desperate battle to salvage their own legitimacy. But the more these elites pillage and loot, and the more they cast citizens aside as human refuse, the more the goons and imbeciles become actual alternatives. The corporate capitalists would prefer the civilized mask of a Hillary Clinton. But they also know that police states and fascist states will not impede their profits; indeed in such a state the capitalists will be more robust in breaking the attempts of the working class to organize for decent wages and working conditions. Citibank, Raytheon and Goldman Sachs will adapt. Capitalism functions very well without democracy.
In the 1990s I watched an impotent, nominally democratic liberal elite in the former Yugoslavia fail to understand and act against the population’s profound economic distress. The fringe demagogues whom the political and educated elites dismissed as buffoons—Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudman—rode an anti-liberal tide to power.
The political elites in Yugoslavia at first thought the nationalist cranks and lunatics, who amassed enough support to be given secondary positions of power, could be contained. This mistake was as misguided as Franz von Papen’s assurances that when the uncouth Austrian Adolf Hitler was appointed the German chancellor in January 1933 the Nazi leader would be easily manipulated. Any system of prolonged political paralysis and failed liberalism vomits up monsters. And the longer we remain in a state of political paralysis—especially as we stumble toward another financial collapse—the more certain it becomes that these monsters will take power.
Fascism, at its core, is an amorphous and incoherent ideology that perpetuates itself by celebrating a grotesque hypermasculinity, elements of which are captured in Trump’s misogyny. It allows disenfranchised people to feel a sense of power and to have their rage sanctified. It takes a politically marginalized and depoliticized population and mobilizes it around a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance and an anointed political savior. It is always militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy and replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as diseased enemies that must be physically purged to restore the health of nation.
Many of these ideological elements are already part of our system of inverted totalitarianism. But inverted totalitarianism, as Sheldon Wolin wrote, disclaims its identity to pay homage to a democracy that in reality has ceased to function. It is characterized by the anonymity of the corporate centers of power. It seeks to keep the population passive and demobilized. I asked Wolin shortly before he died in 2015 that if the two major forms of social control he cited—access to easy and cheap credit and inexpensive, mass-produced consumer products—were no longer available would we see the rise of a more classical form of fascism. He said this would indeed become a possibility.
Bill Clinton transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. He pushed the Republican Party so far to the right it became insane. Hillary Clinton is Mitt Romney in drag. She and the Democratic Party embrace policies—endless war, the security and surveillance state, neoliberalism, austerity, deregulation, new trade agreements and deindustrialization—that are embraced by the Republican elites. Clinton in office will continue the neoliberal assault on the poor and the working poor, and increasingly the middle class, that has defined the corporate state since the Reagan administration. She will do so while speaking in the cloying and hypocritical rhetoric of compassion that masks the cruelty of corporate capitalism.
The Democratic and Republican parties may be able to disappear Trump, but they won’t disappear the phenomena that gave rise to Trump. And unless the downward spiral is reversed—unless the half of the country now living in poverty is lifted out of poverty—the cynical game the elites are playing will backfire. Out of the morass will appear a genuine “Christian” fascist endowed with political skill, intelligence, self-discipline, ruthlessness and charisma. The monster the elites will again unwittingly elevate, as a foil to keep themselves in power, will consume them. There would be some justice in this if we did not all have to pay.
Sunday, October 9, 2016
SC137-4
http://www.salon.com/2016/10/04/election-blindness-its-the-end-of-the-world-economy-as-we-know-it-and-we-feel-fine/
Election blindness: It’s the end of the world economy as we know it — and we feel fine
Our myopic focus on Trump and Clinton has blinded us to a looming debt crisis and a global economy on the precipice
As the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund convene this week in Washington for their annual meeting, there is growing evidence that the post-World War II global consensus that created them is unraveling, right at the time when the global economy is facing major economic headwinds that have been decades in the making.
This great uncoupling, comes as global economic growth and trade numbers continue to disappoint and central bankers in Europe, Japan and the United States have run out of ideas about how to restore their economies to the pre-2008 meltdown expansion rates. Now, they fret over the possibility of a global recession mired in trillions of dollars in public and private debt.
Just last week fears that Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, might need a taxpayer bailout caused investors to feel that pre-2008 clammy cold sweat that precipitated the meltdown.
A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute, “Poorer than their parents? Flat or falling incomes in advanced economies,” documents how the post-World War II capitalist wealth engine — which delivered increasing prosperity for each successive generation — has gone off the rails. According to the think tank, in two-thirds of the households in 25 advanced economies, household incomes were flat or had declined.
This sobering news will only contribute to fading faith in the neo-liberal post-World War II belief that only ever increasing volumes of global trade, facilitated by the likes of the World Bank and the IMF, can deliver a broad-based prosperity. These seismic rumblings manifested in the vote by Britain’s electorate to leave the eurozone over the dire warnings of the IMF and even President Barack Obama.
While some observers may want to believe that the pushback against international multilateralism is solely the consequence of xenophobic racism, there’s also the distinct possibility that the failure of these institutions to deliver global stability or broad-based prosperity is an issue.
VIDEOG20 leaders vow to tackle global growth
Here at home, the global trade model that the World Bank and IMF have promoted as the foundation for a more prosperous world has been rejected as a con job by many voters who have witnessed the hollowing out of so many American cities, once hubs of innovation and industry.
The fact that this deliberate deindustrialization was accompanied by historic wealth concentration at the top and massive amounts of government debt has helped fuel Donald Trump’s populist hijacking of the GOP and Sen. Bernie Sander’s spirited challenge to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
And just what was all that debt buying us? A brand-new infrastructure? Never-ending wars that destabilize more and more of the planet and prompt our soldiers to commit suicide? You can’t help but feel that we are on a runaway train where the engineer is texting.
Our global high-anxiety moment, to which so much of our nation remains oblivious, is the result of a confluence of trends that transcend the economic cycle. In developed economies, aging populations, globalization and automation are all taking their toll.
In some places the onset of global warming, in terms of rising sea levels and changing weather patterns, is already being felt. At the same time, several prolonged regional armed conflicts have gone on for so long, they have now undermined nation states and the rule of law.
Meanwhile, the acceleration in global wealth inequality is shaking faith in multilateral groups like the World Bank and the IMF. While their stated policy mandate includes rhetoric about promoting a broad-based prosperity, critics contend they promote a kind of 21st-century colonialism that uses debt to shackle the developing world.
In the era of social media, central planners are having a much tougher time telling their story, much less sticking to their narrative.
Here in the U.S., despite multiple years of economic stimulus, via zero interest rates after the Great Recession, economic growth rates have remained at historic lows for a so-called recovery. The labor-force-participation rate, youth unemployment, wage stagnation, wealth inequality and the longest slide in productivity since the 1970s are all still problematic.
Similar efforts in Japan and Europe have been even more ineffective at restoring growth. This all is treated in the financial press, in a shorthand, as the “new normal” or our “post-growth world.”
Stephen Roach, former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and now a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs, wrote in a recent post. “What is particularly disconcerting is that central bankers remain largely in denial in the face of this painful reality check.” He added, “Having depleted their traditional arsenal long ago, central bankers remain myopically focused on devising new tools, rather than owning up to the destructive role their old tools played in sparking the crisis.”
Roach warned that while financial markets love any form of monetary accommodation, in the form of low interest rates there “can be no mistaking its dark side,” which includes the promotion of asset bubbles, punishing those who save while incentivizing “reckless risk taking.”
Indeed, Roach has cautioned that current conditions are “not dissimilar to the environment of asset-based excess that incubated the 2008-2009 global financial crisis,” asserting that “central bankers desperately want the public to believe that they know what they are doing. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
But for Richard Wolff, a visiting professor in the New School’s graduate program in international affairs, the post-Great Recession central bankers’ approach has only made problematic wealth inequality worse, increasing the net worth of the top 10 percent even as the rest of society has lost economic ground.
“Their conservative governments have limited themselves to the policies business and the rich always prefer: monetary expansion to get over the immediate crisis and then slow waiting or ‘doing nothing much,’” Wolff wrote to Salon. “Meanwhile, the rich can wait, especially if the waiting is accompanied, as it has been since 2009, by asset price appreciation fueled by expansionary monetary policy.”
“In other words, for the top 10% the upwards redistribution of wealth and income over recent decades and continuing since 2008 compensates them for the limp and lame ‘recovery’ since 2008,” Wolff wrote. “For the other 90%, there is no compensation so the anger and political polarization rise. Empires of the past have blown up and ended in this way before.”
The Federal Reserve’s multiyear zero interest rates may have helped the U.S. paper over the depths of the Great Recession, but it is not without macro economic consequences: This has helped set the stage for an explosion of debt worldwide.
In much of the world, this debt went to expand manufacturing and extraction industries at a time when demand for the output it produced was in decline.
This week’s World Bank and IMF confab comes a year after the International Monetary Fund warned of $3.3 trillion worth of “overborrowing” in fragile emerging markets. For a sense of scale, that is equal to almost five U.S. bank bailouts. In 2004, the level of emerging market corporate debt, outside the banking sector, was $4 trillion. The IMF has said that by 2014 it had ballooned to $18 trillion.
Here in the U.S., our national debt has now bypassed our annual gross domestic product. In 2008, we had national debt of $10 trillion and a $14.7 trillion dollar gross domestic product. In 2015 our national debt was creeping up to $19 trillion with a gross domestic product of close to $18 trillion. It looks like the trend lines crossed in 2013 when the total amount of debt was $16.7 trillion but the GDP came in at $16.6 trillion.
While many experts say that such a debt level for the U.S. is no problem, others are less sanguine. “The so-called experts also said there was no problem with systemic risk built into the system before the 2008 mortgage bubble burst,” said Michael Santoro, professor of management at Santa Clara University. “If anything, post 2008 crisis. we should have learned about double checking our assumptions about systemic risk.”
“In the last financial crisis we had to worry about the impact on government from the bursting of the business bubble,” Santoro said. “In the next crisis we will have to worry about the impact on business from the bursting of the government debt bubble.”
“The Fed has become politicized and now its afraid to end the easy money policy, but we can’t just keep the peddle on the gas no matter what,” warned Santoro. “We need to make some small incremental interest rate increases because the longer we put it off it will only get worse.”
“In 2016 many central banks have driven interest rates to near zero or even negative values,” Frank J.Contractor, a distinguished professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, told Salon. “This has produced only a small discernible stimulus.”
Contractor added, “This is an unhealthy situation on two counts. First, historically low interest rates have created asset bubbles around the world in real estate, stocks, and bonds. Worse, central banks now have little or no room for further maneuver in monetary policy, should future crises arise requiring further stimulus.”
Peter Kenny, a senior market strategist for the Global Markets Advisory Group, agreed the central banks’ monetary policy approach has been overplayed and increasingly disconnected from its results.
“Monetary policy, without coordinated fiscal policy will ultimately fail,” Kenny wrote to Salon. “A classic case in point can be found in the EU at the moment. The EU is mired in stagnant growth while the ranks of the unemployed remain bloated —particularly in the demographics that should reflect the opposite” he said referring to those 24 to 40.
He added, “Fiscal stimulation, in the absence of capital market demand, is essential for the world’s economic to reboot. That theme will dominate this upcoming meetings of the IMF and World Bank.”
But Kenny said turning around the world’s economic trajectory is not just about markets. He argued that it can’t be divorced from improving geopolitical conditions so as to end the “never-ending conflicts from Syria to Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere that drain enthusiasm for fiscal spending elsewhere while simultaneously triggering a collective sense of political and military futility.”
For decades now the received neo-liberal wisdom from the elite institutions of the World Bank and the IMF was that only open markets and unfettered global trade could deliver a broad-based prosperity and advance the well-being of our species on the planet.
Yet, what we have is massive misery for millions caught up in the cross fire of conflict and increasing wealth concentration, thanks to tax evasion and rampant political corruption both here and around the world.
Back in 2013 the World Bank celebrated in a press release that over the previous 30 years the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty (on less than $1.25 a day) had declined from half of the people living in the developing world in 1981, to just 21 percent by 2010. That still left 1.2 billion people in extreme poverty.
But even as the world has seen a decline in so-called extreme poverty, a report from Oxfam International earlier this year documented that the wealth of the 62 of the planet’s richest people was now equivalent to that of the poorest half of the world’s population. “Although world leaders have increasingly talked about the need to tackle inequality,” according to Oxfam’s website, “the gap between the richest and the rest has widened dramatically in the past 12 months.”
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, removed from a world that’s on the precipice of the bursting of a global debt bubble, we zero in on Hillary Clinton’s missing emails and Donald Trump’s missing tax returns.
Election blindness: It’s the end of the world economy as we know it — and we feel fine
Our myopic focus on Trump and Clinton has blinded us to a looming debt crisis and a global economy on the precipice
As the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund convene this week in Washington for their annual meeting, there is growing evidence that the post-World War II global consensus that created them is unraveling, right at the time when the global economy is facing major economic headwinds that have been decades in the making.
This great uncoupling, comes as global economic growth and trade numbers continue to disappoint and central bankers in Europe, Japan and the United States have run out of ideas about how to restore their economies to the pre-2008 meltdown expansion rates. Now, they fret over the possibility of a global recession mired in trillions of dollars in public and private debt.
Just last week fears that Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, might need a taxpayer bailout caused investors to feel that pre-2008 clammy cold sweat that precipitated the meltdown.
A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute, “Poorer than their parents? Flat or falling incomes in advanced economies,” documents how the post-World War II capitalist wealth engine — which delivered increasing prosperity for each successive generation — has gone off the rails. According to the think tank, in two-thirds of the households in 25 advanced economies, household incomes were flat or had declined.
This sobering news will only contribute to fading faith in the neo-liberal post-World War II belief that only ever increasing volumes of global trade, facilitated by the likes of the World Bank and the IMF, can deliver a broad-based prosperity. These seismic rumblings manifested in the vote by Britain’s electorate to leave the eurozone over the dire warnings of the IMF and even President Barack Obama.
While some observers may want to believe that the pushback against international multilateralism is solely the consequence of xenophobic racism, there’s also the distinct possibility that the failure of these institutions to deliver global stability or broad-based prosperity is an issue.
VIDEOG20 leaders vow to tackle global growth
Here at home, the global trade model that the World Bank and IMF have promoted as the foundation for a more prosperous world has been rejected as a con job by many voters who have witnessed the hollowing out of so many American cities, once hubs of innovation and industry.
The fact that this deliberate deindustrialization was accompanied by historic wealth concentration at the top and massive amounts of government debt has helped fuel Donald Trump’s populist hijacking of the GOP and Sen. Bernie Sander’s spirited challenge to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
And just what was all that debt buying us? A brand-new infrastructure? Never-ending wars that destabilize more and more of the planet and prompt our soldiers to commit suicide? You can’t help but feel that we are on a runaway train where the engineer is texting.
Our global high-anxiety moment, to which so much of our nation remains oblivious, is the result of a confluence of trends that transcend the economic cycle. In developed economies, aging populations, globalization and automation are all taking their toll.
In some places the onset of global warming, in terms of rising sea levels and changing weather patterns, is already being felt. At the same time, several prolonged regional armed conflicts have gone on for so long, they have now undermined nation states and the rule of law.
Meanwhile, the acceleration in global wealth inequality is shaking faith in multilateral groups like the World Bank and the IMF. While their stated policy mandate includes rhetoric about promoting a broad-based prosperity, critics contend they promote a kind of 21st-century colonialism that uses debt to shackle the developing world.
In the era of social media, central planners are having a much tougher time telling their story, much less sticking to their narrative.
Here in the U.S., despite multiple years of economic stimulus, via zero interest rates after the Great Recession, economic growth rates have remained at historic lows for a so-called recovery. The labor-force-participation rate, youth unemployment, wage stagnation, wealth inequality and the longest slide in productivity since the 1970s are all still problematic.
Similar efforts in Japan and Europe have been even more ineffective at restoring growth. This all is treated in the financial press, in a shorthand, as the “new normal” or our “post-growth world.”
Stephen Roach, former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and now a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs, wrote in a recent post. “What is particularly disconcerting is that central bankers remain largely in denial in the face of this painful reality check.” He added, “Having depleted their traditional arsenal long ago, central bankers remain myopically focused on devising new tools, rather than owning up to the destructive role their old tools played in sparking the crisis.”
Roach warned that while financial markets love any form of monetary accommodation, in the form of low interest rates there “can be no mistaking its dark side,” which includes the promotion of asset bubbles, punishing those who save while incentivizing “reckless risk taking.”
Indeed, Roach has cautioned that current conditions are “not dissimilar to the environment of asset-based excess that incubated the 2008-2009 global financial crisis,” asserting that “central bankers desperately want the public to believe that they know what they are doing. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
But for Richard Wolff, a visiting professor in the New School’s graduate program in international affairs, the post-Great Recession central bankers’ approach has only made problematic wealth inequality worse, increasing the net worth of the top 10 percent even as the rest of society has lost economic ground.
“Their conservative governments have limited themselves to the policies business and the rich always prefer: monetary expansion to get over the immediate crisis and then slow waiting or ‘doing nothing much,’” Wolff wrote to Salon. “Meanwhile, the rich can wait, especially if the waiting is accompanied, as it has been since 2009, by asset price appreciation fueled by expansionary monetary policy.”
“In other words, for the top 10% the upwards redistribution of wealth and income over recent decades and continuing since 2008 compensates them for the limp and lame ‘recovery’ since 2008,” Wolff wrote. “For the other 90%, there is no compensation so the anger and political polarization rise. Empires of the past have blown up and ended in this way before.”
The Federal Reserve’s multiyear zero interest rates may have helped the U.S. paper over the depths of the Great Recession, but it is not without macro economic consequences: This has helped set the stage for an explosion of debt worldwide.
In much of the world, this debt went to expand manufacturing and extraction industries at a time when demand for the output it produced was in decline.
This week’s World Bank and IMF confab comes a year after the International Monetary Fund warned of $3.3 trillion worth of “overborrowing” in fragile emerging markets. For a sense of scale, that is equal to almost five U.S. bank bailouts. In 2004, the level of emerging market corporate debt, outside the banking sector, was $4 trillion. The IMF has said that by 2014 it had ballooned to $18 trillion.
Here in the U.S., our national debt has now bypassed our annual gross domestic product. In 2008, we had national debt of $10 trillion and a $14.7 trillion dollar gross domestic product. In 2015 our national debt was creeping up to $19 trillion with a gross domestic product of close to $18 trillion. It looks like the trend lines crossed in 2013 when the total amount of debt was $16.7 trillion but the GDP came in at $16.6 trillion.
While many experts say that such a debt level for the U.S. is no problem, others are less sanguine. “The so-called experts also said there was no problem with systemic risk built into the system before the 2008 mortgage bubble burst,” said Michael Santoro, professor of management at Santa Clara University. “If anything, post 2008 crisis. we should have learned about double checking our assumptions about systemic risk.”
“In the last financial crisis we had to worry about the impact on government from the bursting of the business bubble,” Santoro said. “In the next crisis we will have to worry about the impact on business from the bursting of the government debt bubble.”
“The Fed has become politicized and now its afraid to end the easy money policy, but we can’t just keep the peddle on the gas no matter what,” warned Santoro. “We need to make some small incremental interest rate increases because the longer we put it off it will only get worse.”
“In 2016 many central banks have driven interest rates to near zero or even negative values,” Frank J.Contractor, a distinguished professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, told Salon. “This has produced only a small discernible stimulus.”
Contractor added, “This is an unhealthy situation on two counts. First, historically low interest rates have created asset bubbles around the world in real estate, stocks, and bonds. Worse, central banks now have little or no room for further maneuver in monetary policy, should future crises arise requiring further stimulus.”
Peter Kenny, a senior market strategist for the Global Markets Advisory Group, agreed the central banks’ monetary policy approach has been overplayed and increasingly disconnected from its results.
“Monetary policy, without coordinated fiscal policy will ultimately fail,” Kenny wrote to Salon. “A classic case in point can be found in the EU at the moment. The EU is mired in stagnant growth while the ranks of the unemployed remain bloated —particularly in the demographics that should reflect the opposite” he said referring to those 24 to 40.
He added, “Fiscal stimulation, in the absence of capital market demand, is essential for the world’s economic to reboot. That theme will dominate this upcoming meetings of the IMF and World Bank.”
But Kenny said turning around the world’s economic trajectory is not just about markets. He argued that it can’t be divorced from improving geopolitical conditions so as to end the “never-ending conflicts from Syria to Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere that drain enthusiasm for fiscal spending elsewhere while simultaneously triggering a collective sense of political and military futility.”
For decades now the received neo-liberal wisdom from the elite institutions of the World Bank and the IMF was that only open markets and unfettered global trade could deliver a broad-based prosperity and advance the well-being of our species on the planet.
Yet, what we have is massive misery for millions caught up in the cross fire of conflict and increasing wealth concentration, thanks to tax evasion and rampant political corruption both here and around the world.
Back in 2013 the World Bank celebrated in a press release that over the previous 30 years the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty (on less than $1.25 a day) had declined from half of the people living in the developing world in 1981, to just 21 percent by 2010. That still left 1.2 billion people in extreme poverty.
But even as the world has seen a decline in so-called extreme poverty, a report from Oxfam International earlier this year documented that the wealth of the 62 of the planet’s richest people was now equivalent to that of the poorest half of the world’s population. “Although world leaders have increasingly talked about the need to tackle inequality,” according to Oxfam’s website, “the gap between the richest and the rest has widened dramatically in the past 12 months.”
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, removed from a world that’s on the precipice of the bursting of a global debt bubble, we zero in on Hillary Clinton’s missing emails and Donald Trump’s missing tax returns.
Monday, October 3, 2016
SC137-3
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/sizing-up-the-endgame/
Sizing Up the Endgame
All Hillary had to do last week was show up and stand at a podium for ninety minutes without swooning while Donald Trump barked and grunted his way through the half-assed press conference we like to call a “debate.” It was all I could do to keep watching the nauseating spectacle. It made you want to reach out and whap your TV upside its head, or maybe just shoot the fucker, like Elvis used to do.
The torment of who or what to vote for has become unbearable. I’d considered casting mine for Johnson / Weld, until Gary Johnson demonstrated that the front end of his brain is missing. Aleppo? Wasn’t he one of the Marx Brothers? I sense that Jill Stein of the Green Party is more Social Justice Warrior than EcoWarrior, and the last thing I want is for the rest of America to become one big college campus rife with trigger warnings and micro-aggression persecutions. Vote for Trump? Not if you chained me to the back bumper of a Toyota Landcruiser and dragged me over six miles of broken light bulbs. Hillary? Make that nine miles, and throw down some carpet tacks.
But wait a minute…! Here’s something to consider: a proposition put out by David McAlvany on his podcast last week: To Understand Election 2016 You Have to See 2020. (The new podcast is posted on Wednesdays, so to listen after Oct 5 you’ll have to click back a week.) The idea is that the winner of the presidential election is sure to be the biggest loser because the global economy is in the process of tanking, Long Emergency style, and the global finance system is going down with it. Whoever presides over this fiasco from the White House is going to be a bigger bag-holder than old Herbert Hoover in 1929.
The salutary part of the story is that such an epochal crack-up will sweep the establishment out of power. In the present case, this means discrediting the crony-capitalist, revolving-door grifters of the Wall Street / Washington axis, plus the neo-con military empire-builders bent on starting World War Three for profit, plus the economic central planners of the Federal Reserve whose desperate meddlings have nearly destroyed the necessary operations and meaning of money. And the cherries on top to get thrown out with the rest of this giant shit sundae would be the campus cultural Maoists. In short, vote for Hillary and let history flush them all out of the system.
A vote for Trump would let the aforesaid villains and bunglers off the hook because supposedly Trump represents free market business interests, and if he got elected they would be blamed for the economic and financial cataclysm which has been in motion for going on for two decades — and has accelerated mightily under the genial Obama. Whatever else you might say about free markets, had they been allowed to operate naturally, a lot of dead wood might have been cleared out of the financial forest by allowing failing institutions and companies to crash and burn. Instead, they were artificially propped up and hosed down with bailouts and other accounting frauds at all costs. The cost turns out to be the coherent workings of markets.
There can be little question that Hillary represents so much that has gone wrong in American public life under the Baby Boomer regime. The fact that she will be the oldest president ever at inauguration itself says a lot about the limitless cupidity of the Boomer political gen. They just don’t know when to stop. It’s history’s job to stop them now, nature’s way, by seating them at the banquet of consequences for all their poisonous cookery and quackery.
Watching these lamebrain debates, you get the impression that the folks running things, including media stars like the debate moderators, lack the slightest clue about the gathering economic storm. They are too busy reading the false weather reports posted by the Fed and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both Hillary and Trump seem to believe that we can winkle our way back to a 1962-style economy if we click our ruby slippers three times. That is not going to happen.
There are too many people on-board the planet and too few resources to keep them all going. It’s hard to say whether we might have managed the necessary contraction, say, starting back in the 1970s when the writing was on the wall and a truly honest president (one Jimmy Carter) spelled it out in plain English. We blew it, electing Ronald Reagan to enable the final feeding frenzy of the techno-industrial age.
Now it’s up to natural forces — and their galloping horsemen — to get the job done. So let us by all means throw out votes behind Hillary and let her rip so we can move on from there sooner rather than later and find new ways to remain civilized in the coming disposition of things.
Sizing Up the Endgame
All Hillary had to do last week was show up and stand at a podium for ninety minutes without swooning while Donald Trump barked and grunted his way through the half-assed press conference we like to call a “debate.” It was all I could do to keep watching the nauseating spectacle. It made you want to reach out and whap your TV upside its head, or maybe just shoot the fucker, like Elvis used to do.
The torment of who or what to vote for has become unbearable. I’d considered casting mine for Johnson / Weld, until Gary Johnson demonstrated that the front end of his brain is missing. Aleppo? Wasn’t he one of the Marx Brothers? I sense that Jill Stein of the Green Party is more Social Justice Warrior than EcoWarrior, and the last thing I want is for the rest of America to become one big college campus rife with trigger warnings and micro-aggression persecutions. Vote for Trump? Not if you chained me to the back bumper of a Toyota Landcruiser and dragged me over six miles of broken light bulbs. Hillary? Make that nine miles, and throw down some carpet tacks.
But wait a minute…! Here’s something to consider: a proposition put out by David McAlvany on his podcast last week: To Understand Election 2016 You Have to See 2020. (The new podcast is posted on Wednesdays, so to listen after Oct 5 you’ll have to click back a week.) The idea is that the winner of the presidential election is sure to be the biggest loser because the global economy is in the process of tanking, Long Emergency style, and the global finance system is going down with it. Whoever presides over this fiasco from the White House is going to be a bigger bag-holder than old Herbert Hoover in 1929.
The salutary part of the story is that such an epochal crack-up will sweep the establishment out of power. In the present case, this means discrediting the crony-capitalist, revolving-door grifters of the Wall Street / Washington axis, plus the neo-con military empire-builders bent on starting World War Three for profit, plus the economic central planners of the Federal Reserve whose desperate meddlings have nearly destroyed the necessary operations and meaning of money. And the cherries on top to get thrown out with the rest of this giant shit sundae would be the campus cultural Maoists. In short, vote for Hillary and let history flush them all out of the system.
A vote for Trump would let the aforesaid villains and bunglers off the hook because supposedly Trump represents free market business interests, and if he got elected they would be blamed for the economic and financial cataclysm which has been in motion for going on for two decades — and has accelerated mightily under the genial Obama. Whatever else you might say about free markets, had they been allowed to operate naturally, a lot of dead wood might have been cleared out of the financial forest by allowing failing institutions and companies to crash and burn. Instead, they were artificially propped up and hosed down with bailouts and other accounting frauds at all costs. The cost turns out to be the coherent workings of markets.
There can be little question that Hillary represents so much that has gone wrong in American public life under the Baby Boomer regime. The fact that she will be the oldest president ever at inauguration itself says a lot about the limitless cupidity of the Boomer political gen. They just don’t know when to stop. It’s history’s job to stop them now, nature’s way, by seating them at the banquet of consequences for all their poisonous cookery and quackery.
Watching these lamebrain debates, you get the impression that the folks running things, including media stars like the debate moderators, lack the slightest clue about the gathering economic storm. They are too busy reading the false weather reports posted by the Fed and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both Hillary and Trump seem to believe that we can winkle our way back to a 1962-style economy if we click our ruby slippers three times. That is not going to happen.
There are too many people on-board the planet and too few resources to keep them all going. It’s hard to say whether we might have managed the necessary contraction, say, starting back in the 1970s when the writing was on the wall and a truly honest president (one Jimmy Carter) spelled it out in plain English. We blew it, electing Ronald Reagan to enable the final feeding frenzy of the techno-industrial age.
Now it’s up to natural forces — and their galloping horsemen — to get the job done. So let us by all means throw out votes behind Hillary and let her rip so we can move on from there sooner rather than later and find new ways to remain civilized in the coming disposition of things.
Sunday, October 2, 2016
SC137-2
https://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/this-is-the-end-my-friend/
This Is The End, My Friend!
These words from Jim Morrison’s 1967 song ~ originally intended as a breakup message to his girlfriend ~ are prophetic, almost proleptically describing what is now coming to full flower here in the homeland, in the brave new world of America fifty years hence. Do we, or at the very least, do those responsible for managing the affairs of State, even stop to review the coalescence of intertwining events, globally and domestically, that increasingly define the dimensions of our collapse ~ the End?
Let us review some of the more salient aspects. We have an untethered FINANCIAL industry~the very heart of our capitalist economy~set free by Billy-boy Clinton himself, an industry running wild and run amuck, over citizens and markets alike. The 2008 financial collapse is only one dimension of the larger domestic and global turmoil it has spawned. The subprime mortgage debacle is another piece of that clusterfuck. Of course, Wells Fargo’s recent fraudulent activities, are yet a further indication of the fractious disease infecting our banking and financial system. Investors are being fleeced, homeowners thrown out on the streets, savings accounts vanished, jobs lost, poverty abounding~all right here in the homeland. All the while our banking-elites keep right on paying-off Queen Hilary, her red-nosed court jester of a husband, as well as others on her friends and family plan.
Then, of course, we have international financial scandals, also involved in pay-for-play schemes with, who else, the Clinton clan, their Foundation, as well as a host of other characters whose names become more familiar to us each and every day. The behemoth British bank, HSBC, was found to have funneled some $80MM to the Clinton Foundation (perhaps a money-laundering scheme). Meanwhile, James Comey, Director of the FBI, previously on the Board of Directors of HSBC, recently excused Queen Hilary from Federal prosecution in the case of the treasonous scandal concerning classified information while she headed the State Department. And, not to forget any of the relevant players, your very own Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, brokered an HSBC settlement deal, ultimately letting the bank off the hook for over $100MM in tax evasion. The captains of the banking industry, their boards, and our bought-and-paid-for leaders just keep playing catch-me-if-you-can with the American people. And, of course, this does not even address the speaking fees to the Queen-in-waiting totaling millions of dollars from the most prominent of financial institutions.
Shall we move on to the Obama health insurance scam? Here we have a federal order mandating each and every citizen purchase health insurance from private insurance corporations, or face federal fines. And the premiums demanded by these private insurers keep rising exponentially, along with the deductibles that are quickly bankrupting a large portion of Americans who can ill-afford it. And, of course, the new law was written by the INSURANCE industry lobby itself.
What about the ENERGY industry? Well here we have another gang of crooks, thieves, and thugs who, now that the liquid-gold is harder to find, are fracking through bedrock to squeeze out whatever they can manage from the earth, and in so doing poisoning the ground water and drinking water supplies of cities and villages across the land. In the meanwhile, they are soliciting the government, and buying up right of ways to lay oil and gas pipeline across the country, in untouched wilderness, and smack through the heart of sacred, American Indian lands. And so, we get militarized police responses to the efforts of native Americans and other citizens to try and stop the despoilation.
Speaking of POLICE. We have indefensible police killings of black Americans over the past five years in increasingly alarming and escalating numbers. And the protests in response to such killings are met with equally disturbing militarized reactions from what appear to be local, state and federally-sanctioned militias. Where are we heading?
Speaking of militarized militias, it’s time we speak of the American appetite for WAR. Our hunger seems insatiable! From Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ukraine, and Syria, we cannot seem to keep our hands out of other peoples’ pants. We instigate, cajole, threaten, finance, arm, manage, and support civil wars, insurrections, regime change, all under the false umbrella of humanitarian aims, when the facts suggest otherwise. Why are we trying to overthrow Assad? Is it because he refused our deal years ago for the pipeline? And, why are we supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, for example? Why is Joe Biden’s coke-head son, Hunter (also a former executive at MBNA America Bank) on the board of directors of Ukraine’s energy company, Burisma? For that matter, why is Natalie Jaresko, a former U.S. diplomat and recently-minted Ukrainian citizen, who was involved in insider dealings while managing a $150 million U.S. AID-backed investment fund, now the Finance Minister of Ukraine? Easy answers, we paid for the revolution, the coup, so we get to play in the sandbox. More pay-for-play, internationally.
And what of the wholesale surveillance of US citizens in our newly-minted SECURITY STATE overflowing with its many tentacled apparatchiks~ NSA, CIA, FEMA, DHS, etc.? I mean we all know this is standard operating procedure by our government now, but we refuse to stand up to it or rebel against it. And the people informing us of such deceptions and unconstitutional activities are persecuted and prosecuted: Manning, Assange, Snowden and others. The powers-that-be say they are protecting us against TERRORISM. But who is terrorizing whom? What of 9/11? Congress has approved the rights of ‘terror’ victims to sue Saudi Arabia. Why? Were they involved? Was there collusion, coordination with the US government? Was this a FALSE FLAG event in order to overthrow Sadam in Iraq and move on from there to the rest of the MENA? And who funded Al Quaeda? ISIS, ISIL, Daesh? Why do they have US weapons and trucks? What other potentially false-flag events have transpired both here in the exceptional country and in Europe at large? Speculation abounds, as do the conspiracy theories. But, really why should we doubt the speculators and conspiracy theorists? Do we have any more reason to believe the likes of Queen Hilary, Bill the red-nosed reindeer, Hussein Obama, the US MIC, the spooks (CIA, NSA, etc), or the oligarchs and bankers who are lying through their teeth, dissembling at each and every turn, and making war profits to boot?
And, now, we’ve decided to polarize and DEMONIZE RUSSIA, China and Iran. The propaganda being spread like creamy peanut butter across the airwaves is incredible. Putin himself is responsible for everything from rigging the Democratic election to destroying humanitarian convoys in Syria. Of course, he stole Crimea; the annexation had nothing to do with an vote by Crimeans in the wake of a US-backed and engineered neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine. And we won’t allow China to protect its own territorial waters. And we will be damned if Iran wants to enhance its relations with Syria or Russia.
These are only a few of the elements defining The End. We have been had, my friends; but we won’t be fooled again! Or will we?
This Is The End, My Friend!
These words from Jim Morrison’s 1967 song ~ originally intended as a breakup message to his girlfriend ~ are prophetic, almost proleptically describing what is now coming to full flower here in the homeland, in the brave new world of America fifty years hence. Do we, or at the very least, do those responsible for managing the affairs of State, even stop to review the coalescence of intertwining events, globally and domestically, that increasingly define the dimensions of our collapse ~ the End?
Let us review some of the more salient aspects. We have an untethered FINANCIAL industry~the very heart of our capitalist economy~set free by Billy-boy Clinton himself, an industry running wild and run amuck, over citizens and markets alike. The 2008 financial collapse is only one dimension of the larger domestic and global turmoil it has spawned. The subprime mortgage debacle is another piece of that clusterfuck. Of course, Wells Fargo’s recent fraudulent activities, are yet a further indication of the fractious disease infecting our banking and financial system. Investors are being fleeced, homeowners thrown out on the streets, savings accounts vanished, jobs lost, poverty abounding~all right here in the homeland. All the while our banking-elites keep right on paying-off Queen Hilary, her red-nosed court jester of a husband, as well as others on her friends and family plan.
Then, of course, we have international financial scandals, also involved in pay-for-play schemes with, who else, the Clinton clan, their Foundation, as well as a host of other characters whose names become more familiar to us each and every day. The behemoth British bank, HSBC, was found to have funneled some $80MM to the Clinton Foundation (perhaps a money-laundering scheme). Meanwhile, James Comey, Director of the FBI, previously on the Board of Directors of HSBC, recently excused Queen Hilary from Federal prosecution in the case of the treasonous scandal concerning classified information while she headed the State Department. And, not to forget any of the relevant players, your very own Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, brokered an HSBC settlement deal, ultimately letting the bank off the hook for over $100MM in tax evasion. The captains of the banking industry, their boards, and our bought-and-paid-for leaders just keep playing catch-me-if-you-can with the American people. And, of course, this does not even address the speaking fees to the Queen-in-waiting totaling millions of dollars from the most prominent of financial institutions.
Shall we move on to the Obama health insurance scam? Here we have a federal order mandating each and every citizen purchase health insurance from private insurance corporations, or face federal fines. And the premiums demanded by these private insurers keep rising exponentially, along with the deductibles that are quickly bankrupting a large portion of Americans who can ill-afford it. And, of course, the new law was written by the INSURANCE industry lobby itself.
What about the ENERGY industry? Well here we have another gang of crooks, thieves, and thugs who, now that the liquid-gold is harder to find, are fracking through bedrock to squeeze out whatever they can manage from the earth, and in so doing poisoning the ground water and drinking water supplies of cities and villages across the land. In the meanwhile, they are soliciting the government, and buying up right of ways to lay oil and gas pipeline across the country, in untouched wilderness, and smack through the heart of sacred, American Indian lands. And so, we get militarized police responses to the efforts of native Americans and other citizens to try and stop the despoilation.
Speaking of POLICE. We have indefensible police killings of black Americans over the past five years in increasingly alarming and escalating numbers. And the protests in response to such killings are met with equally disturbing militarized reactions from what appear to be local, state and federally-sanctioned militias. Where are we heading?
Speaking of militarized militias, it’s time we speak of the American appetite for WAR. Our hunger seems insatiable! From Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ukraine, and Syria, we cannot seem to keep our hands out of other peoples’ pants. We instigate, cajole, threaten, finance, arm, manage, and support civil wars, insurrections, regime change, all under the false umbrella of humanitarian aims, when the facts suggest otherwise. Why are we trying to overthrow Assad? Is it because he refused our deal years ago for the pipeline? And, why are we supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, for example? Why is Joe Biden’s coke-head son, Hunter (also a former executive at MBNA America Bank) on the board of directors of Ukraine’s energy company, Burisma? For that matter, why is Natalie Jaresko, a former U.S. diplomat and recently-minted Ukrainian citizen, who was involved in insider dealings while managing a $150 million U.S. AID-backed investment fund, now the Finance Minister of Ukraine? Easy answers, we paid for the revolution, the coup, so we get to play in the sandbox. More pay-for-play, internationally.
And what of the wholesale surveillance of US citizens in our newly-minted SECURITY STATE overflowing with its many tentacled apparatchiks~ NSA, CIA, FEMA, DHS, etc.? I mean we all know this is standard operating procedure by our government now, but we refuse to stand up to it or rebel against it. And the people informing us of such deceptions and unconstitutional activities are persecuted and prosecuted: Manning, Assange, Snowden and others. The powers-that-be say they are protecting us against TERRORISM. But who is terrorizing whom? What of 9/11? Congress has approved the rights of ‘terror’ victims to sue Saudi Arabia. Why? Were they involved? Was there collusion, coordination with the US government? Was this a FALSE FLAG event in order to overthrow Sadam in Iraq and move on from there to the rest of the MENA? And who funded Al Quaeda? ISIS, ISIL, Daesh? Why do they have US weapons and trucks? What other potentially false-flag events have transpired both here in the exceptional country and in Europe at large? Speculation abounds, as do the conspiracy theories. But, really why should we doubt the speculators and conspiracy theorists? Do we have any more reason to believe the likes of Queen Hilary, Bill the red-nosed reindeer, Hussein Obama, the US MIC, the spooks (CIA, NSA, etc), or the oligarchs and bankers who are lying through their teeth, dissembling at each and every turn, and making war profits to boot?
And, now, we’ve decided to polarize and DEMONIZE RUSSIA, China and Iran. The propaganda being spread like creamy peanut butter across the airwaves is incredible. Putin himself is responsible for everything from rigging the Democratic election to destroying humanitarian convoys in Syria. Of course, he stole Crimea; the annexation had nothing to do with an vote by Crimeans in the wake of a US-backed and engineered neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine. And we won’t allow China to protect its own territorial waters. And we will be damned if Iran wants to enhance its relations with Syria or Russia.
These are only a few of the elements defining The End. We have been had, my friends; but we won’t be fooled again! Or will we?
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
SC137-1
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/police_killings_wont_stop_20160925
Police Killings Won’t Stop
The corporate state, no matter how many protests take place in American cities over the murder of unarmed citizens, will put no restraints on the police or the organs of security and surveillance. It will not protect the victims of state violence. It will continue to grant broader powers and greater resources to militarized police departments and internal security forces such as Homeland Security. Force, along with the systems of indoctrination and propaganda, is the last prop that keeps the corporate elites in power. These elites will do nothing to diminish the mechanisms necessary for their control.
The corporate state, by pillaging the nation, has destroyed capitalism’s traditional forms of social control. The population is integrated into a capitalist democracy by decent wages and employment opportunities, labor unions, mass-produced consumer products, a modest say in governance, mechanisms for marginal reform, pensions, affordable health care, a judiciary that is not utterly subservient to the elites and corporate power, the possibility for social, political and economic advancement, good public education, arts funding and a public broadcasting system that gives a platform to those who are not in service to the elites. These elements make possible the common good, or at least the perception of the common good.
Global capitalism, however, is not concerned with the cohesion of the nation-state. The relentless quest for profit trumps internal stability. Everything and everyone is pillaged and harvested for profit. Democracy is a mirage, a useful fiction to keep the population passive and compliant. Propaganda, including entertainment and spectacle, and coercion through state-administered surveillance and violence are the primary tools of governance. This is why, despite years of egregious police violence, there is no effective reform.
Propaganda is not solely about instilling an opinion. It is also about appropriating the aspirations of the citizenry into the vocabulary of the power elite. The Clintons and Barack Obama built their careers mastering this duplicity. They speak in words that reflect the concerns of the citizenry, while pushing through programs and legislation that mock those concerns. This has been especially true in the long campaign to curb excessive police force. The liberal elites preach “tolerance” and “professionalism” and promote “diversity.” But they do not challenge the structural racism and economic exploitation that are the causes of our crisis. They treat the abuses of corporate oppression as if they were minor administrative defects rather than essential components of corporate power.
Naomi Murakawa in her book “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America” documents how the series of “reforms” enacted to professionalize police departments resulted in placing more money and resources into the hands of the police, giving them greater power to act with impunity and expanding legally sanctioned violence. All penal reform, from President Harry Truman’s 1947 Committee on Civil Rights report to the Safe Streets Act of 1968 to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 to contemporary calls for more professionalization, have, she notes, only made things worse.
The fiction used to justify expanded police powers, a fiction perpetrated by Democratic politicians such as Bill Clinton and Obama, is that a modernized police will make possible a just and post-racial America. White supremacy, racism and corporate exploitation, however, are built into the economic model of neoliberalism and our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” A discussion about police violence has to include a discussion of corporate power. Police violence is one of the primary pillars that allow the corporate elites to retain power. That violence will end only when the rule of these elites ends.
The calls for more training and professionalization, the hiring of minority police officers, the use of body and dash cameras, improving procedures for due process, creating citizen review boards, even the reading of Miranda rights, have done nothing to halt the indiscriminate use of lethal violence and abuse of constitutional rights by the police and courts. Reforms have served only to bureaucratize, professionalize and legalize state abuse and murder. Innocent men and women may no longer be lynched on a tree, but they are lynched on death row and in the streets of New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, Charlotte and dozens of other cities. They are lynched for the reasons poor black people have always been lynched—to create a reign of terror that serves as an effective form of social control.
The wreckage left behind by deindustrialization created a dilemma for the corporate state. The vast pools of “surplus” or “redundant” labor in our former manufacturing centers meant the old forms of social control had disappeared. The corporate state needed harsher mechanisms to subjugate a population it condemned as human refuse. Those on probation and parole or in jails or prisons grew from 780,000 in 1965 to 7 million in 2010. The kinds of federal crimes punishable by death leaped from one in 1974 to 66 in 1994, thanks to the Clinton administration. The lengths of prison sentences tripled and quadrupled. Laws were passed to turn inner-city communities into miniature police states. This had nothing to do with crime.
Amiri Baraka, the author of the incendiary poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” understood. In that poem he called us to examine the epicenters of capitalist power and the dark heart of imperialism. He knew the organs of state security served not only a corporate system but also a dehumanizing ideology. It is the system and the ideology that are the evils. The police are only its most visible and public instruments of oppression.
In this excerpt from the poem, Baraka asked:
Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philippines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese
Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers
Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army
Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker
Who? Who? Who?
Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war
Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain’t nobody bigger
Who own this city
Who own the air
Who own the water
Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth
Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
State-administered violence is all that lies between the corporate state and widespread unrest. The power elites know it. They also know that as this unrest begins to define the white underclass, the legal and physical shackles perfected for poor people of color can easily be expanded. Rights in America have become privileges. And the corporate state has created legal mechanisms, including the loss of our right to privacy, to remove these privileges the instant it feels threatened.
Liberals’ rhetoric of compassion is as destructive as conservatives’ call for law and order. The liberal stances are patronizing. They reduce structural and economic oppression to personal and psychological problems, as if we can solve police murder by training and empowering “good” people, supporting families or rewriting regulations. As long as our discussion of police violence ignores the social functions of police and prisons, the elites have nothing to fear. The police, in the end, are not the problem. They, like the military, are the foot soldiers for the corporate leviathan.
The corporate state needs to create the illusion that the courts and the police are impartial and just. Once this illusion is cemented into the public consciousness, victims can be blamed for their oppression. Institutionalized murder becomes acceptable. Police violence becomes part of the cost of keeping us safe. The oppressed have no legitimacy or voice.
The corporate state is interested only in fostering these illusions. Reforms will be, as they have been in the past, cosmetic. What advances have we made since police murdered Michael Brown two years ago in Ferguson? Have the some 200 civilian review boards across the country, most of them toothless and ineffectual, prevented police from gunning down people in our streets or brought the killers to justice? Police have killed over 700 people this year. The illusions of reform are used to alter public consciousness rather than the machinery of corporate power. These illusions are created to reassure us that those that are arrested, beaten, killed or sent away to prison for decades deserve their fate. Yes, the state may admit, there is an abuse committed here or an injustice committed there, but the system itself, the state insists, is fundamentally fair and just. This is a lie the elites go to tremendous lengths to disseminate.
The corporate state is counting on counterviolence against police, which is inevitable, and further acts of domestic terrorism, which also are inevitable. Acts of violence directed against the state are used by the organs of state propaganda, including the corporate press, to foster a culture of fear, to deify the police and to demonize the oppressed in our inner cities and in the Middle East. All criticism of excessive state violence, once these illusions dominate the society, will be condemned as disloyal and unpatriotic. The corporate state, until it is destroyed, will do what it is designed to do—kill with impunity.
Police Killings Won’t Stop
The corporate state, no matter how many protests take place in American cities over the murder of unarmed citizens, will put no restraints on the police or the organs of security and surveillance. It will not protect the victims of state violence. It will continue to grant broader powers and greater resources to militarized police departments and internal security forces such as Homeland Security. Force, along with the systems of indoctrination and propaganda, is the last prop that keeps the corporate elites in power. These elites will do nothing to diminish the mechanisms necessary for their control.
The corporate state, by pillaging the nation, has destroyed capitalism’s traditional forms of social control. The population is integrated into a capitalist democracy by decent wages and employment opportunities, labor unions, mass-produced consumer products, a modest say in governance, mechanisms for marginal reform, pensions, affordable health care, a judiciary that is not utterly subservient to the elites and corporate power, the possibility for social, political and economic advancement, good public education, arts funding and a public broadcasting system that gives a platform to those who are not in service to the elites. These elements make possible the common good, or at least the perception of the common good.
Global capitalism, however, is not concerned with the cohesion of the nation-state. The relentless quest for profit trumps internal stability. Everything and everyone is pillaged and harvested for profit. Democracy is a mirage, a useful fiction to keep the population passive and compliant. Propaganda, including entertainment and spectacle, and coercion through state-administered surveillance and violence are the primary tools of governance. This is why, despite years of egregious police violence, there is no effective reform.
Propaganda is not solely about instilling an opinion. It is also about appropriating the aspirations of the citizenry into the vocabulary of the power elite. The Clintons and Barack Obama built their careers mastering this duplicity. They speak in words that reflect the concerns of the citizenry, while pushing through programs and legislation that mock those concerns. This has been especially true in the long campaign to curb excessive police force. The liberal elites preach “tolerance” and “professionalism” and promote “diversity.” But they do not challenge the structural racism and economic exploitation that are the causes of our crisis. They treat the abuses of corporate oppression as if they were minor administrative defects rather than essential components of corporate power.
Naomi Murakawa in her book “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America” documents how the series of “reforms” enacted to professionalize police departments resulted in placing more money and resources into the hands of the police, giving them greater power to act with impunity and expanding legally sanctioned violence. All penal reform, from President Harry Truman’s 1947 Committee on Civil Rights report to the Safe Streets Act of 1968 to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 to contemporary calls for more professionalization, have, she notes, only made things worse.
The fiction used to justify expanded police powers, a fiction perpetrated by Democratic politicians such as Bill Clinton and Obama, is that a modernized police will make possible a just and post-racial America. White supremacy, racism and corporate exploitation, however, are built into the economic model of neoliberalism and our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” A discussion about police violence has to include a discussion of corporate power. Police violence is one of the primary pillars that allow the corporate elites to retain power. That violence will end only when the rule of these elites ends.
The calls for more training and professionalization, the hiring of minority police officers, the use of body and dash cameras, improving procedures for due process, creating citizen review boards, even the reading of Miranda rights, have done nothing to halt the indiscriminate use of lethal violence and abuse of constitutional rights by the police and courts. Reforms have served only to bureaucratize, professionalize and legalize state abuse and murder. Innocent men and women may no longer be lynched on a tree, but they are lynched on death row and in the streets of New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, Charlotte and dozens of other cities. They are lynched for the reasons poor black people have always been lynched—to create a reign of terror that serves as an effective form of social control.
The wreckage left behind by deindustrialization created a dilemma for the corporate state. The vast pools of “surplus” or “redundant” labor in our former manufacturing centers meant the old forms of social control had disappeared. The corporate state needed harsher mechanisms to subjugate a population it condemned as human refuse. Those on probation and parole or in jails or prisons grew from 780,000 in 1965 to 7 million in 2010. The kinds of federal crimes punishable by death leaped from one in 1974 to 66 in 1994, thanks to the Clinton administration. The lengths of prison sentences tripled and quadrupled. Laws were passed to turn inner-city communities into miniature police states. This had nothing to do with crime.
Amiri Baraka, the author of the incendiary poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” understood. In that poem he called us to examine the epicenters of capitalist power and the dark heart of imperialism. He knew the organs of state security served not only a corporate system but also a dehumanizing ideology. It is the system and the ideology that are the evils. The police are only its most visible and public instruments of oppression.
In this excerpt from the poem, Baraka asked:
Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philippines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese
Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers
Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army
Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker
Who? Who? Who?
Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war
Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain’t nobody bigger
Who own this city
Who own the air
Who own the water
Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth
Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
State-administered violence is all that lies between the corporate state and widespread unrest. The power elites know it. They also know that as this unrest begins to define the white underclass, the legal and physical shackles perfected for poor people of color can easily be expanded. Rights in America have become privileges. And the corporate state has created legal mechanisms, including the loss of our right to privacy, to remove these privileges the instant it feels threatened.
Liberals’ rhetoric of compassion is as destructive as conservatives’ call for law and order. The liberal stances are patronizing. They reduce structural and economic oppression to personal and psychological problems, as if we can solve police murder by training and empowering “good” people, supporting families or rewriting regulations. As long as our discussion of police violence ignores the social functions of police and prisons, the elites have nothing to fear. The police, in the end, are not the problem. They, like the military, are the foot soldiers for the corporate leviathan.
The corporate state needs to create the illusion that the courts and the police are impartial and just. Once this illusion is cemented into the public consciousness, victims can be blamed for their oppression. Institutionalized murder becomes acceptable. Police violence becomes part of the cost of keeping us safe. The oppressed have no legitimacy or voice.
The corporate state is interested only in fostering these illusions. Reforms will be, as they have been in the past, cosmetic. What advances have we made since police murdered Michael Brown two years ago in Ferguson? Have the some 200 civilian review boards across the country, most of them toothless and ineffectual, prevented police from gunning down people in our streets or brought the killers to justice? Police have killed over 700 people this year. The illusions of reform are used to alter public consciousness rather than the machinery of corporate power. These illusions are created to reassure us that those that are arrested, beaten, killed or sent away to prison for decades deserve their fate. Yes, the state may admit, there is an abuse committed here or an injustice committed there, but the system itself, the state insists, is fundamentally fair and just. This is a lie the elites go to tremendous lengths to disseminate.
The corporate state is counting on counterviolence against police, which is inevitable, and further acts of domestic terrorism, which also are inevitable. Acts of violence directed against the state are used by the organs of state propaganda, including the corporate press, to foster a culture of fear, to deify the police and to demonize the oppressed in our inner cities and in the Middle East. All criticism of excessive state violence, once these illusions dominate the society, will be condemned as disloyal and unpatriotic. The corporate state, until it is destroyed, will do what it is designed to do—kill with impunity.
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