https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/04/22/the-trump-administrations-iran-policy-will-hasten-imperial-decline/
The Trump Administration’s Iran Policy Will Hasten Imperial Decline
There was a postwar order, but was it liberal? Like most political orders, it looked much better on paper than it did in practice and to the core members of the order than those on the margins…
Liberal values were only remotely attached to the postwar institutions. Sovereign equality did not translate into a liberal world order. The postwar institutions were run by the most powerful countries, with middle and lesser powers either shunted to the back of the room or locked out altogether…Third World now comprised most of the world’s states, but it was on the outside looking in. Western states enjoyed democracy and the rule of law, but the U.S. and the former colonial masters undermined rather than supported democracy and human rights elsewhere. Some Western states and analysts presumed that the global order must have some legitimacy because there were no great (or at least successful) revolts by the Third World, but they mistook coercion and the lack of alternative for consent…
The suggestion, then, is that if the international order is having greater difficulty creating rule-based governance, it might have less to do with the weakening of liberalism and more to do with the fact that the rules that have been in place for decades were overdue for an overhaul, and especially given a shift in power from the West to the East.
– From Michael N. Barnett’s piece: The End of a Liberal International Order That Never Existed
A primary focus of my writing of late centers around the idea that the policies of the Trump administration, and the neocons in control of it, will hasten the decline of U.S. imperial power and more rapidly usher in a multi-polar (and possibly bifurcated) world. Today’s news regarding the elimination of waivers on Iranian oil imports provides another perfect example.
Specifically, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced earlier today that waivers which allowed eight countries to import Iranian crude oil without being subject to U.S. sanctions would expire on May 2 without extension. The eight countries included are China, India, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, Greece, Italy and Taiwan.
This move is an extraordinarily foolish and reckless act which illustrates the extreme hubris and short sightedness of those running American foreign policy under Trump. What the U.S. is decreeing to the entire world with this action is that the U.S., and the U.S. alone, decides who gets to trade with who. The U.S. is telling China, the second largest economy in the world and home to over one billion people, that it lacks the sovereign authority to buy oil from Iran if it so desires. If the U.S. can unilaterally play boss on the trade decisions of foreign countries, national sovereignty does not exist in practice anywhere on the planet. There is only empire.
As such, this goes beyond aggressive foreign policy. It’s more or less an assertion by the Trump administration that the world is in fact a global dictatorship run by a single nation (empire) that has granted itself the authority to arbitrarily decide which countries get to participate in global trade, and which ones do not. Now that the true nature of U.S. power is so completely out in the open, countries will have to decide to either bend the knee or resist, which seems to be the point. What do you think China’s going to do?
One thing people seem to miss when making geopolitical observations is an analysis of the role played by internal politics. It’s not all about military or economic might, popular opinion on the ground and the domestic internal mood also matter when it comes to foreign policy success or failure. It’s from this perspective that China appears to hold a better hand than the U.S.
Political power is largely about perception and narrative control, which is why the U.S. move here is so fundamentally irresponsible. Chinese leadership can play the victim game and sell their perspective easily to the public. Look at rising oil prices they’ll say, noting that this is the result of the Americans not allowing anyone to buy oil from Iran. Why shouldn’t the great nation of China be able to buy oil from whomever they want, they’ll say.
The U.S. will look like a global bully meddling in the affairs of a sovereign nation, and this narrative will resonate with the population there. China’s leadership can call this an unprovoked attack on the Chinese people and their national sovereignty. China will not bend the knee to the U.S. for many reasons, but an overlooked factor relates to the fact that the public would not find such subjugation acceptable. If public opinion didn’t matter, governments wouldn’t spend so much time propagandizing and actively keeping their citizens uninformed.
The U.S. finds itself in the exact opposite scenario. While compulsive liars like Pompeo can endlessly repeat nonsense such as “Iran is the number one state-sponsor of terrorism,” nobody but the most brainwashed Trump diehards actually believe this. As such, the masses of people here in the U.S. won’t get riled up and excited about another pointless Middle East conflict, particularly as oil prices continue to march higher. Unlike China, U.S. leadership can’t reasonably expect to convince the American public the Trump administration is simply playing defense with its aggressive action against Iran. It’s crystal clear the move is nothing more than a power-play designed to consolidate, and possibly even expand, American imperial dominance. Importantly, wars for empire are not particularly popular domestically, and getting less so with each passing day.
What I’m trying to say is Chinese leadership can expect to have the public on its side if it decides to resist U.S. diktats on who it can purchase oil from. China standing up for its right to buy oil from any country it desires is an easily defensible position, representing the only position any truly sovereign state can have. On the other hand, a single country unilaterally deciding trade for everyone else on earth is not a defensible or reasonable position. As mentioned earlier, it’s not just about military and economic might, geopolitics is also impacted by the internal dynamics of various populations, and on this front the U.S. is positioned poorly.
The American public has become increasingly sick of wars and empire for simple economic and societal reasons, if not for ethical ones. People can look around and see their towns and infrastructure crumbling as trillions are spent overseas. Empire isn’t good for the average American citizen in the long-run, it merely provides lucrative money-making opportunities for our depraved elites. People are finally starting to pick up on this. While national defense is of the utmost importance, national offense is evil, stupid and wasteful.
Once again, from Michael Barnett’s piece, The End of a Liberal International Order That Never Existed:
The West has lived with the myth of a liberal international order for many decades. Myths are powerful and hard to surrender because they serve important functions. They helped the West maintain a solidarity and sense of purpose. They acted as an ideology and helped the powerful feel as if might makes right. It is not clear that those outside the Western club ever bought into the myth, but they had little success posing a viable alternative.
U.S. elites appear more focused than ever on imperial ambitions at the exact moment the general population tires of it. This isn’t a recipe for success, it’s a road map to collapse.
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Tuesday, April 23, 2019
SC188-5
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51457.htm
Satire
Uncle Tom's Empire
I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but, given the arrest of Julian Assange last week, and the awkward and cowardly responses thereto, I felt it necessary to abandon my customary literary standards and spew out a spineless, hypocritical “hot take” professing my concern about the dangerous precedent the U.S. government may be setting by extraditing and prosecuting a publisher for exposing American war crimes and such, while at the same time making it abundantly clear how much I personally loathe Assange, and consider him an enemy of America, and freedom, and want the authorities to crush him like a cockroach.
Now I want to be absolutely clear. I totally defend Assange and Wikileaks, and the principle of freedom of the press, and whatever. And I am all for exposing American war crimes (as long as it doesn’t endanger the lives of the Americans who committed those war crimes, or inconvenience them in any way). At the same time, while I totally support all that, I feel compelled to express my support together with my personal loathing of Assange, who, if all those important principles weren’t involved, I would want to see taken out and shot, or at least locked up in Super-Max solitary … not for any crime in particular, but just because I personally loathe him so much.
I’m not quite sure why I loathe Assange. I’ve never actually met the man. I just have this weird, amorphous feeling that he’s a horrible, disgusting, extremist person who is working for the Russians and is probably a Nazi. It feels kind of like that feeling I had, back in the Winter of 2003, that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, which he was going to give to those Al Qaeda terrorists who were bayonetting little babies in their incubators, or the feeling I still have, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Trump is a Russian intelligence asset who peed on Barack Obama’s bed, and who is going to set fire to the Capitol building, declare himself American Hitler, and start rounding up and murdering the Jews.
I don’t know where these feelings come from. If you challenged me, I probably couldn’t really support them with any, like, actual facts or anything, at least not in any kind of rational way. Being an introspective sort of person, I do sometimes wonder if maybe my feelings are the result of all the propaganda and relentless psychological and emotional conditioning that the ruling classes and the corporate media have subjected me to since the day I was born, and that influential people in my social circle have repeated, over and over again, in such a manner as to make it clear that contradicting their views would be extremely unwelcome, and might negatively impact my social status, and my prospects for professional advancement.
Take my loathing of Assange, for example. I feel like I can’t even write a column condemning his arrest and extradition without gratuitously mocking or insulting the man. When I try to, I feel this sudden fear of being denounced as a “Trump-loving Putin-Nazi,” and a “Kremlin-sponsored rape apologist,” and unfriended by all my Facebook friends. Worse, I get this sickening feeling that unless I qualify my unqualified support for freedom of press, and transparency, and so on, with some sort of vicious, vindictive remark about the state of Assange’s body odor, and how he’s probably got cooties, or has pooped his pants, or some other childish and sadistic taunt, I can kiss any chance I might have had of getting published in a respectable publication goodbye.
But I’m probably just being paranoid, right? Distinguished, highbrow newspapers and magazines like The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vox, Vice, Daily Mail, and others of that caliber, are not just propaganda organs whose primary purpose is to reinforce the official narratives of the ruling classes. No, they publish a broad range of opposing views. The Guardian, for example, just got Owen Jones to write a full-throated defense of Assange on that grounds that he’s probably a Nazi rapist who should be locked up in a Swedish prison, not in an American prison! The Guardian, remember, is the same publication that printed a completely fabricated story accusing Assange of secretly meeting with Paul Manafort and some alleged “Russians,” among a deluge of other such Russiagate nonsense, and that has been demonizing Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite for several years.
Plus, according to NPR’s Bob Garfield (who is lustfully “looking forward to Assange’s day in court”), and other liberal lexicologists, Julian Assange is not even a real journalist, so we have no choice but to mock and humiliate him, and accuse him of rape and espionage … oh, and speaking of which, did you hear the one about how his cat was spying on the Ecuadorean diplomats?
But seriously now, all joking aside, it’s always instructive (if a bit sickening) to watch as the mandarins of the corporate media disseminate an official narrative and millions of people robotically repeat it as if it were their own opinions. This process is particularly nauseating to watch when the narrative involves the stigmatization, delegitimization, and humiliation of an official enemy of the ruling classes. Typically, this enemy is a foreign enemy, like Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Milošević, Osama bin Laden, Putin, or whoever. But sometimes the enemy is one of “us” … a traitor, a Judas, a quisling, a snitch, like Trump, Corbyn, or Julian Assange.
In either case, the primary function of the corporate media remains the same: to relentlessly assassinate the character of the “enemy,” and to whip the masses up into a mindless frenzy of hatred of him, like the Two-Minutes Hate in 1984, the Kill-the-Pig scene in Lord of the Flies, the scapegoating of Jews in Nazi Germany, and other examples a bit closer to home.
Logic, facts, and actual evidence have little to nothing to do with this process. The goal of the media and other propagandists is not to deceive or mislead the masses. Their goal is to evoke the pent-up rage and hatred simmering within the masses and channel it toward the official enemy. It is not necessary for the demonization of the official enemy to be remotely believable, or stand up to any kind of serious scrutiny. No one sincerely believes that Donald Trump is a Russian Intelligence asset, or that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite, or that Julian Assange has been arrested for jumping bail, or raping anyone, or for helping Chelsea Manning “hack” a password.
The demonization of the empire’s enemies is not a deception … it is a loyalty test. It is a ritual in which the masses (who, let’s face it, are de facto slaves) are ordered to display their fealty to their masters, and their hatred of their masters’ enemies. Cooperative slaves have plenty of pent-up hatred to unleash upon their masters’ enemies. They have all the pent-up hatred of their masters (which they do not dare direct at their masters, except within the limits their masters allow), and they have all the hatred of themselves for being cooperative, and … well, basically, cowards.
Julian Assange is being punished for defying the global capitalist empire. This was always going to happen, no matter who was in the White House. Anyone who defies the empire in such a flagrant manner is going to be punished. Cooperative slaves demand this of their masters. Defiant slaves are actually less of a threat to their masters than they are to the other slaves who have chosen to accept their slavery and cooperate with their own oppression. Their defiance shames these cooperative slaves, and shines an unflattering light on their cowardice.
This is why we are witnessing so many liberals (and liberals in leftist’s clothing) rushing to express their loathing of Assange in the same breath as they pretend to support him, not because they honestly believe the content of the official Julian Assange narrative that the ruling classes are disseminating, but because (a) they fear the consequences of not robotically repeating this narrative, and (b) Assange has committed the cardinal sin of reminding them that actual “resistance” to the global capitalist empire is possible, but only if you’re willing to pay the price.
Assange has been paying it for the last seven years, and is going to be paying it for the foreseeable future. Chelsea Manning is paying it again. The Gilets Jaunes protestors have been paying it in France. Malcolm X paid it. Sophie Scholl paid it. Many others throughout history have paid it. Cowards mocked them as they did, as they are mocking Julian Assange at the moment. That’s all right, though, after he’s been safely dead for ten or twenty years, they’ll name a few streets and high schools after him. Maybe they’ll even build him a monument.
Satire
Uncle Tom's Empire
I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but, given the arrest of Julian Assange last week, and the awkward and cowardly responses thereto, I felt it necessary to abandon my customary literary standards and spew out a spineless, hypocritical “hot take” professing my concern about the dangerous precedent the U.S. government may be setting by extraditing and prosecuting a publisher for exposing American war crimes and such, while at the same time making it abundantly clear how much I personally loathe Assange, and consider him an enemy of America, and freedom, and want the authorities to crush him like a cockroach.
Now I want to be absolutely clear. I totally defend Assange and Wikileaks, and the principle of freedom of the press, and whatever. And I am all for exposing American war crimes (as long as it doesn’t endanger the lives of the Americans who committed those war crimes, or inconvenience them in any way). At the same time, while I totally support all that, I feel compelled to express my support together with my personal loathing of Assange, who, if all those important principles weren’t involved, I would want to see taken out and shot, or at least locked up in Super-Max solitary … not for any crime in particular, but just because I personally loathe him so much.
I’m not quite sure why I loathe Assange. I’ve never actually met the man. I just have this weird, amorphous feeling that he’s a horrible, disgusting, extremist person who is working for the Russians and is probably a Nazi. It feels kind of like that feeling I had, back in the Winter of 2003, that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, which he was going to give to those Al Qaeda terrorists who were bayonetting little babies in their incubators, or the feeling I still have, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Trump is a Russian intelligence asset who peed on Barack Obama’s bed, and who is going to set fire to the Capitol building, declare himself American Hitler, and start rounding up and murdering the Jews.
I don’t know where these feelings come from. If you challenged me, I probably couldn’t really support them with any, like, actual facts or anything, at least not in any kind of rational way. Being an introspective sort of person, I do sometimes wonder if maybe my feelings are the result of all the propaganda and relentless psychological and emotional conditioning that the ruling classes and the corporate media have subjected me to since the day I was born, and that influential people in my social circle have repeated, over and over again, in such a manner as to make it clear that contradicting their views would be extremely unwelcome, and might negatively impact my social status, and my prospects for professional advancement.
Take my loathing of Assange, for example. I feel like I can’t even write a column condemning his arrest and extradition without gratuitously mocking or insulting the man. When I try to, I feel this sudden fear of being denounced as a “Trump-loving Putin-Nazi,” and a “Kremlin-sponsored rape apologist,” and unfriended by all my Facebook friends. Worse, I get this sickening feeling that unless I qualify my unqualified support for freedom of press, and transparency, and so on, with some sort of vicious, vindictive remark about the state of Assange’s body odor, and how he’s probably got cooties, or has pooped his pants, or some other childish and sadistic taunt, I can kiss any chance I might have had of getting published in a respectable publication goodbye.
But I’m probably just being paranoid, right? Distinguished, highbrow newspapers and magazines like The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vox, Vice, Daily Mail, and others of that caliber, are not just propaganda organs whose primary purpose is to reinforce the official narratives of the ruling classes. No, they publish a broad range of opposing views. The Guardian, for example, just got Owen Jones to write a full-throated defense of Assange on that grounds that he’s probably a Nazi rapist who should be locked up in a Swedish prison, not in an American prison! The Guardian, remember, is the same publication that printed a completely fabricated story accusing Assange of secretly meeting with Paul Manafort and some alleged “Russians,” among a deluge of other such Russiagate nonsense, and that has been demonizing Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite for several years.
Plus, according to NPR’s Bob Garfield (who is lustfully “looking forward to Assange’s day in court”), and other liberal lexicologists, Julian Assange is not even a real journalist, so we have no choice but to mock and humiliate him, and accuse him of rape and espionage … oh, and speaking of which, did you hear the one about how his cat was spying on the Ecuadorean diplomats?
But seriously now, all joking aside, it’s always instructive (if a bit sickening) to watch as the mandarins of the corporate media disseminate an official narrative and millions of people robotically repeat it as if it were their own opinions. This process is particularly nauseating to watch when the narrative involves the stigmatization, delegitimization, and humiliation of an official enemy of the ruling classes. Typically, this enemy is a foreign enemy, like Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Milošević, Osama bin Laden, Putin, or whoever. But sometimes the enemy is one of “us” … a traitor, a Judas, a quisling, a snitch, like Trump, Corbyn, or Julian Assange.
In either case, the primary function of the corporate media remains the same: to relentlessly assassinate the character of the “enemy,” and to whip the masses up into a mindless frenzy of hatred of him, like the Two-Minutes Hate in 1984, the Kill-the-Pig scene in Lord of the Flies, the scapegoating of Jews in Nazi Germany, and other examples a bit closer to home.
Logic, facts, and actual evidence have little to nothing to do with this process. The goal of the media and other propagandists is not to deceive or mislead the masses. Their goal is to evoke the pent-up rage and hatred simmering within the masses and channel it toward the official enemy. It is not necessary for the demonization of the official enemy to be remotely believable, or stand up to any kind of serious scrutiny. No one sincerely believes that Donald Trump is a Russian Intelligence asset, or that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite, or that Julian Assange has been arrested for jumping bail, or raping anyone, or for helping Chelsea Manning “hack” a password.
The demonization of the empire’s enemies is not a deception … it is a loyalty test. It is a ritual in which the masses (who, let’s face it, are de facto slaves) are ordered to display their fealty to their masters, and their hatred of their masters’ enemies. Cooperative slaves have plenty of pent-up hatred to unleash upon their masters’ enemies. They have all the pent-up hatred of their masters (which they do not dare direct at their masters, except within the limits their masters allow), and they have all the hatred of themselves for being cooperative, and … well, basically, cowards.
Julian Assange is being punished for defying the global capitalist empire. This was always going to happen, no matter who was in the White House. Anyone who defies the empire in such a flagrant manner is going to be punished. Cooperative slaves demand this of their masters. Defiant slaves are actually less of a threat to their masters than they are to the other slaves who have chosen to accept their slavery and cooperate with their own oppression. Their defiance shames these cooperative slaves, and shines an unflattering light on their cowardice.
This is why we are witnessing so many liberals (and liberals in leftist’s clothing) rushing to express their loathing of Assange in the same breath as they pretend to support him, not because they honestly believe the content of the official Julian Assange narrative that the ruling classes are disseminating, but because (a) they fear the consequences of not robotically repeating this narrative, and (b) Assange has committed the cardinal sin of reminding them that actual “resistance” to the global capitalist empire is possible, but only if you’re willing to pay the price.
Assange has been paying it for the last seven years, and is going to be paying it for the foreseeable future. Chelsea Manning is paying it again. The Gilets Jaunes protestors have been paying it in France. Malcolm X paid it. Sophie Scholl paid it. Many others throughout history have paid it. Cowards mocked them as they did, as they are mocking Julian Assange at the moment. That’s all right, though, after he’s been safely dead for ten or twenty years, they’ll name a few streets and high schools after him. Maybe they’ll even build him a monument.
Monday, April 22, 2019
SC188-4
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/ominous-tendings-in-the-nervous-here-and-now/
Ominous Tendings in the Nervous Here and Now
Unfortunately for the nation, the RussiaGate fiasco is only half over. There is just too much documented official turpitude on the public record for the authorities to answer for and the institutional damage runs too deep. Act One, the Mueller investigation, was a 22-month circle-jerk of prosecutorial misconduct and media malfeasance. Act Two will be the circular firing squad of former officials assassinating each other’s character to desperately avoid prosecution.
In the meantime, there is the nation’s business which has been hopelessly burdened by an hallucinatory overlay of Wokester idiocy emanating from the campuses, so that even in the absence of the Mueller distraction every organized endeavor in this land from-sea-to-shining-sea is paralyzed by race-and-gender hustles. Next up: a national debate over reparations for slavery in the never-ending quest to monetize moral posturing. Won’t that be a mighty string of knots to untangle? Who qualifies, exactly? What about the indigenous people whose lands were overrun? And what about the Japanese interned in 1941? And what about women prevented from earning salaries all those lost decades of housewifery? And what about the brown people from many lands whose families did not come here until slavery was a long time gone? Do Silicon Valley engineers from India, and thoracic surgeons from the Philippines have to pay up for the sins of Whitey?
That circus won’t stop until America gets whapped upside the head by economic reality and, really, who is paying attention to that? The shale oil “miracle” has put even the superstars of economic commentary to sleep, though the quandary in plain sight is that the mighty flow of shale oil doesn’t pencil out as a money-making enterprise, and the whole project is destined to fall part even more rapidly than in the decade since it was ramped up. When the private oil companies finally sink into bankruptcy, the obvious “solution” will be to nationalize the industry — a giant step toward destroying the dollar and whatever residual value the industry might have had.
After a month-long case of influenza around Christmas time, the financial markets recovered and are once again demonstrating that they only go up — in defiance of the laws of physics, which actually do apply to markets and economies. It’s a fantastic stunt of computer algo math and misplaced faith in magic, and when it all blows up, as it must, it will make all the other delusions spinning in American life look like mere passing impure thoughts. The notional wealth involved — which is to say, the wealth of nations — has two ways to evaporate: either the stocks, bonds, and other derivatives lose their value, or the money that they represent loses its value. In either case the wealth will be gone and America will be left with the sad recognition that it is broke both privately and publicly.
In the background lay the ticking time bombs of health care, college loan debt, and pension funds. These are rackets and Ponzi schemes. Before we get to Medicare-for-all, I’d like to see congress pass one simple law requiring all medical service “providers” in the land to publicly post the price of all their services, from the cost of heart transplants down to those $90 Tylenols they dispense. Let’s see how that affects the lawless hocus-pocus of insurance companies “negotiating” their payments with the medical corporatocracy before we go whole-hog for a nationalized health service. The colleges have already destroyed themselves intellectually, and thereby the value of their overpriced credentialing services. The smaller colleges are already folding, and many more will follow now until higher education becomes a boutique industry.
The pension funds are truly big, ominous bombs, because when they fail, they will set up unresolvable fiscal problems that will turn ugly and political. Even if the federal government attempts some kind of “one-time” bail-out, it will not solve the embedded Ponzi problem of a system that has to pay off an ever-expanding pool of claims with an ever-diminishing stream of revenue. It will only be another swipe of the blade cutting off the legs of the US dollar so that it in the end every pensioner will receive his-or-her promised payout in dollars that are increasingly worthless. We may even discover that the opioid epidemic has been the only thing keeping the immiserated denizens of Flyover-land from resorting to violent insurrection.
These internal problems of the USA point in the direction of states and whole regions stealthily seceding from a federal system that can’t run itself competently at scale anymore. The process has already begun in such acts of defiance as “sanctuary states” and the burgeoning marijuana industry. Unlike the calamity of 1861, though, there may be no way to even attempt to hold the old Union together, even by force. Instead, as is the case with all foundering empires, the end will be a sickening slide into a new and strange disposition of things. One of the last successful acts of the American empire may be to send the RussiaGate instigators to jail.
Ominous Tendings in the Nervous Here and Now
Unfortunately for the nation, the RussiaGate fiasco is only half over. There is just too much documented official turpitude on the public record for the authorities to answer for and the institutional damage runs too deep. Act One, the Mueller investigation, was a 22-month circle-jerk of prosecutorial misconduct and media malfeasance. Act Two will be the circular firing squad of former officials assassinating each other’s character to desperately avoid prosecution.
In the meantime, there is the nation’s business which has been hopelessly burdened by an hallucinatory overlay of Wokester idiocy emanating from the campuses, so that even in the absence of the Mueller distraction every organized endeavor in this land from-sea-to-shining-sea is paralyzed by race-and-gender hustles. Next up: a national debate over reparations for slavery in the never-ending quest to monetize moral posturing. Won’t that be a mighty string of knots to untangle? Who qualifies, exactly? What about the indigenous people whose lands were overrun? And what about the Japanese interned in 1941? And what about women prevented from earning salaries all those lost decades of housewifery? And what about the brown people from many lands whose families did not come here until slavery was a long time gone? Do Silicon Valley engineers from India, and thoracic surgeons from the Philippines have to pay up for the sins of Whitey?
That circus won’t stop until America gets whapped upside the head by economic reality and, really, who is paying attention to that? The shale oil “miracle” has put even the superstars of economic commentary to sleep, though the quandary in plain sight is that the mighty flow of shale oil doesn’t pencil out as a money-making enterprise, and the whole project is destined to fall part even more rapidly than in the decade since it was ramped up. When the private oil companies finally sink into bankruptcy, the obvious “solution” will be to nationalize the industry — a giant step toward destroying the dollar and whatever residual value the industry might have had.
After a month-long case of influenza around Christmas time, the financial markets recovered and are once again demonstrating that they only go up — in defiance of the laws of physics, which actually do apply to markets and economies. It’s a fantastic stunt of computer algo math and misplaced faith in magic, and when it all blows up, as it must, it will make all the other delusions spinning in American life look like mere passing impure thoughts. The notional wealth involved — which is to say, the wealth of nations — has two ways to evaporate: either the stocks, bonds, and other derivatives lose their value, or the money that they represent loses its value. In either case the wealth will be gone and America will be left with the sad recognition that it is broke both privately and publicly.
In the background lay the ticking time bombs of health care, college loan debt, and pension funds. These are rackets and Ponzi schemes. Before we get to Medicare-for-all, I’d like to see congress pass one simple law requiring all medical service “providers” in the land to publicly post the price of all their services, from the cost of heart transplants down to those $90 Tylenols they dispense. Let’s see how that affects the lawless hocus-pocus of insurance companies “negotiating” their payments with the medical corporatocracy before we go whole-hog for a nationalized health service. The colleges have already destroyed themselves intellectually, and thereby the value of their overpriced credentialing services. The smaller colleges are already folding, and many more will follow now until higher education becomes a boutique industry.
The pension funds are truly big, ominous bombs, because when they fail, they will set up unresolvable fiscal problems that will turn ugly and political. Even if the federal government attempts some kind of “one-time” bail-out, it will not solve the embedded Ponzi problem of a system that has to pay off an ever-expanding pool of claims with an ever-diminishing stream of revenue. It will only be another swipe of the blade cutting off the legs of the US dollar so that it in the end every pensioner will receive his-or-her promised payout in dollars that are increasingly worthless. We may even discover that the opioid epidemic has been the only thing keeping the immiserated denizens of Flyover-land from resorting to violent insurrection.
These internal problems of the USA point in the direction of states and whole regions stealthily seceding from a federal system that can’t run itself competently at scale anymore. The process has already begun in such acts of defiance as “sanctuary states” and the burgeoning marijuana industry. Unlike the calamity of 1861, though, there may be no way to even attempt to hold the old Union together, even by force. Instead, as is the case with all foundering empires, the end will be a sickening slide into a new and strange disposition of things. One of the last successful acts of the American empire may be to send the RussiaGate instigators to jail.
Sunday, April 21, 2019
SC188-3
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/04/11/trying-to-change-the-system-from-within-is-like-trying-to-dry-your-hair-with-rain/
Trying To Change The System From Within Is Like Trying To Dry Your Hair With Rain
At a recent appearance at an Obama Foundation Town Hall in Berlin, former US president Barack Obama expressed concerns that American progressives are too fixated on purity and too unwilling to work within the existing system to solve problems.
“One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States – maybe it’s true here as well – is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘Uh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,’ and then we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad,’ where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues. And when that happens, typically the overall effort and movement weakens,” Obama said.
Yes, the warmongering oligarch crony is deeply worried that people who aren’t warmongering oligarch cronies are too mean to warmongering oligarch cronies. As the Democratic Party presidential primary heats up we are hearing more and more people voicing deep, solemn concerns that the party’s progressive base doesn’t always obey the dictates of its leadership, and is in fact sometimes quite rude about it. Even Bernie Sanders has issued a stern, much-publicized warning to his followers that he condemns “bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space” toward supporters of his right-wing opponents.
Of course, this grave concern about rank-and-file progressives saying mean things about Joe Biden on the internet ignores the way the so-called “centrist” leadership of the party has been bullying and attacking its left wing for decades. Only through the lens of the most determined mental gymnastics can you look at the way the mainstream establishment dominates public narratives, rigs its own primaries, ignores and undermines dissidents, and bashes everyone who refuses to fall in line while strangling all Americans to death with exploitative neoliberalism, and conclude that it’s the “Bernie bros” who are the bullies.
Obama’s “circular firing squad” comment is the part of this speech that is drawing the most criticism, for understandable reasons, but it was actually part of a much longer and even more noxious appeal to the strategy of making compromises within the system to effect change. He cited his own efforts in the Paris climate accord as an example of what working within the system and making compromises can accomplish, fully acknowledging the fact that even if every country in the accord fully met its burden, it still wouldn’t be sufficient to avert cataclysmic climate disaster.
“When I helped get the Paris agreement on climate accomplished, I was the first one to say what we’ve done here is not adequate to meet the demands of climate science,” Obama said. “The measures that had been set, the targets that had been set by each country, even if they all met them, wouldn’t be sufficient to address the pace at which temperatures were rising and emissions were going into the atmosphere. But if I had held out for us getting to where we need to be in the science, we wouldn’t have gotten the accord.”
And we all know what happened there. Obama legitimized an accord which amounted to nothing more than a Sesame Street children’s band-aid on a sucking chest wound, collected all the political accolades as a champion of the environment while continuing to quietly bolster the fossil fuel industry, and then when the pendulum swung back to the other head of America’s two-headed one party system, the US government announced its intent to withdraw from the accord. So we’re left with a former president surrounded by a very attractive narrative of progressivism who actually accomplished nothing besides continuing and expanding Bush’s wars and Orwellian surveillance programs, absolving the crooks behind the Global Financial Crisis, and continuing the crushing neoliberal policies which led to the American people’s collective middle finger to the establishment in electing Donald Trump. That’s your legacy, Barack.
I don’t pretend to know exactly what’s in Obama’s heart, or what used to be. The money he’s been raking in for Wall Street speaking appearances certainly doesn’t paint the picture of a man who regrets doing the sleazy things he did while in office, but when he first entered politics it’s entirely possible that there was some intention mixed in with all the ambition to make some positive changes in people’s lives if possible. But his notion that you can work within the system to affect positive change has been soundly debunked by his own legacy, and by the disaffected populace that it created.
Trying to work within the system to effect positive change is like trying to dry your hair with rainwater. It’s never effective to use the system for solving problems, because the system is the problem.
Proponents of Obama’s approach describe an inaccurate picture of what’s going on. They describe the people as being over here, their problems being over there, and then the system that you can use to solve the problems as this other third thing somewhere else that exists separately. In an accurate picture, the people are over here, and the problems and the system are one inseparable thing sitting across from them.
The fact of the matter is that the entire US political system has been deliberately slanted to favor the plutocratic class, and the plutocratic class can only exist in an environment of inequality and oppression. A system where money translates directly to political influence necessarily creates an environment where those with money are able to rule as kings as long as they can keep all the money to themselves. Since money equals power and power is relative, those with the most money are naturally incentivized to keep money out of the hands of everyone else, because if everyone is king then there are no kings. The poorer they can keep everyone else, the more relative power they have. They’re able to use their wealth to buy up political and media influence, whereas the rest of Americans, most of whom would struggle to pay even a one thousand dollar emergency bill, are unable to do anything similar on anywhere near that scale.
This is why Americans have the problems that they have, and you see the same dynamic mirrored in other nations throughout the world. There are people who benefit from keeping the public poor, uninformed and powerless while reaping huge profits from ecocidal capitalism and war profiteering, which in turn gives them even more wealth and therefore even more power over the masses. This is the dynamic you must necessarily climb into and make your home in order to “work within the system”.
I try not to fall into Godwin’s law too often, but a perfect analogy for this would be if someone in Nazi Germany were trying to protect Jews by working overtly within the political power structures of the time. A German Obama would have said “Well I’m not getting anywhere trying to protect the Jews from extermination because I don’t have enough power, so let me integrate myself into the current power structure we have now and see if I can help reach some compromises.” At the end of his term he’d be saying “Well I wasn’t able to do anything to stop the whole Jew killing thing, turns out they’re really into that here. But I was able to get a climate deal going that makes me look like a really nice guy!”
I call Obama’s particular brand of establishment sycophancy Nice Guy Fascism. It’s just like regular fascism, enabling the brutal dominion of a few depraved and bloodthirsty tyrants, except you get to look like a nice guy while you’re participating in it. You claim you want to help people, but you put on the uniform of fascism and advance its pernicious ideology in order to do so. To “work within the system” you have to climb into the system, ingratiate yourself to the system, and keep the system sufficiently pleased with you so that it won’t reject you like a mismatched organ transplant. You’re covering yourself with feces and then running into the crowd trying to wipe the dirt off them with your hands.
So what can we do instead? Well, the dynamic I just described means that all the power has been stacked heavily in favor of status quo power structures, so it’s not an easy fix. It’s not as simple as starting a new political party or organizing more effectively, because the system is already deliberately stacked heavily against exactly those kinds of escape plans. What we’ve got to do is work way outside the system and weaken public trust in it, with the hope of awakening the masses from their MSM-induced coma and persuading them to use the power of their numbers to shrug off the plutocratic oppression machine that’s been squeezing them their entire lives.
The way to do that is with relentless acts of narrative sabotage at every opportunity, exposing the lies of the narrative matrix and reducing the public’s already low trust in the mass media to nil. We’ve got few things working to our advantage toward that end, but they are powerful. We’ve got the fact that we’ve got enthusiasm and creativity on our side, while establishment cronies are boring, artless, unfunny, permanently uninspired, and reliably several steps behind the zeitgeist. We’ve got our unprecedented ability to network and share information. And we’ve got our species’ capacity to awaken from its dreamlike relationship with mental narrative, which I believe could be the X factor hidden below the surface of the human experience which leads to the creation of a healthy world.
It’s not much, but it’s what we’ve got, and it’s a hell of a lot more effective than Obama’s recommendation of towel drying while submerged underwater.
Trying To Change The System From Within Is Like Trying To Dry Your Hair With Rain
At a recent appearance at an Obama Foundation Town Hall in Berlin, former US president Barack Obama expressed concerns that American progressives are too fixated on purity and too unwilling to work within the existing system to solve problems.
“One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States – maybe it’s true here as well – is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘Uh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,’ and then we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad,’ where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues. And when that happens, typically the overall effort and movement weakens,” Obama said.
Yes, the warmongering oligarch crony is deeply worried that people who aren’t warmongering oligarch cronies are too mean to warmongering oligarch cronies. As the Democratic Party presidential primary heats up we are hearing more and more people voicing deep, solemn concerns that the party’s progressive base doesn’t always obey the dictates of its leadership, and is in fact sometimes quite rude about it. Even Bernie Sanders has issued a stern, much-publicized warning to his followers that he condemns “bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space” toward supporters of his right-wing opponents.
Of course, this grave concern about rank-and-file progressives saying mean things about Joe Biden on the internet ignores the way the so-called “centrist” leadership of the party has been bullying and attacking its left wing for decades. Only through the lens of the most determined mental gymnastics can you look at the way the mainstream establishment dominates public narratives, rigs its own primaries, ignores and undermines dissidents, and bashes everyone who refuses to fall in line while strangling all Americans to death with exploitative neoliberalism, and conclude that it’s the “Bernie bros” who are the bullies.
Obama’s “circular firing squad” comment is the part of this speech that is drawing the most criticism, for understandable reasons, but it was actually part of a much longer and even more noxious appeal to the strategy of making compromises within the system to effect change. He cited his own efforts in the Paris climate accord as an example of what working within the system and making compromises can accomplish, fully acknowledging the fact that even if every country in the accord fully met its burden, it still wouldn’t be sufficient to avert cataclysmic climate disaster.
“When I helped get the Paris agreement on climate accomplished, I was the first one to say what we’ve done here is not adequate to meet the demands of climate science,” Obama said. “The measures that had been set, the targets that had been set by each country, even if they all met them, wouldn’t be sufficient to address the pace at which temperatures were rising and emissions were going into the atmosphere. But if I had held out for us getting to where we need to be in the science, we wouldn’t have gotten the accord.”
And we all know what happened there. Obama legitimized an accord which amounted to nothing more than a Sesame Street children’s band-aid on a sucking chest wound, collected all the political accolades as a champion of the environment while continuing to quietly bolster the fossil fuel industry, and then when the pendulum swung back to the other head of America’s two-headed one party system, the US government announced its intent to withdraw from the accord. So we’re left with a former president surrounded by a very attractive narrative of progressivism who actually accomplished nothing besides continuing and expanding Bush’s wars and Orwellian surveillance programs, absolving the crooks behind the Global Financial Crisis, and continuing the crushing neoliberal policies which led to the American people’s collective middle finger to the establishment in electing Donald Trump. That’s your legacy, Barack.
I don’t pretend to know exactly what’s in Obama’s heart, or what used to be. The money he’s been raking in for Wall Street speaking appearances certainly doesn’t paint the picture of a man who regrets doing the sleazy things he did while in office, but when he first entered politics it’s entirely possible that there was some intention mixed in with all the ambition to make some positive changes in people’s lives if possible. But his notion that you can work within the system to affect positive change has been soundly debunked by his own legacy, and by the disaffected populace that it created.
Trying to work within the system to effect positive change is like trying to dry your hair with rainwater. It’s never effective to use the system for solving problems, because the system is the problem.
Proponents of Obama’s approach describe an inaccurate picture of what’s going on. They describe the people as being over here, their problems being over there, and then the system that you can use to solve the problems as this other third thing somewhere else that exists separately. In an accurate picture, the people are over here, and the problems and the system are one inseparable thing sitting across from them.
The fact of the matter is that the entire US political system has been deliberately slanted to favor the plutocratic class, and the plutocratic class can only exist in an environment of inequality and oppression. A system where money translates directly to political influence necessarily creates an environment where those with money are able to rule as kings as long as they can keep all the money to themselves. Since money equals power and power is relative, those with the most money are naturally incentivized to keep money out of the hands of everyone else, because if everyone is king then there are no kings. The poorer they can keep everyone else, the more relative power they have. They’re able to use their wealth to buy up political and media influence, whereas the rest of Americans, most of whom would struggle to pay even a one thousand dollar emergency bill, are unable to do anything similar on anywhere near that scale.
This is why Americans have the problems that they have, and you see the same dynamic mirrored in other nations throughout the world. There are people who benefit from keeping the public poor, uninformed and powerless while reaping huge profits from ecocidal capitalism and war profiteering, which in turn gives them even more wealth and therefore even more power over the masses. This is the dynamic you must necessarily climb into and make your home in order to “work within the system”.
I try not to fall into Godwin’s law too often, but a perfect analogy for this would be if someone in Nazi Germany were trying to protect Jews by working overtly within the political power structures of the time. A German Obama would have said “Well I’m not getting anywhere trying to protect the Jews from extermination because I don’t have enough power, so let me integrate myself into the current power structure we have now and see if I can help reach some compromises.” At the end of his term he’d be saying “Well I wasn’t able to do anything to stop the whole Jew killing thing, turns out they’re really into that here. But I was able to get a climate deal going that makes me look like a really nice guy!”
I call Obama’s particular brand of establishment sycophancy Nice Guy Fascism. It’s just like regular fascism, enabling the brutal dominion of a few depraved and bloodthirsty tyrants, except you get to look like a nice guy while you’re participating in it. You claim you want to help people, but you put on the uniform of fascism and advance its pernicious ideology in order to do so. To “work within the system” you have to climb into the system, ingratiate yourself to the system, and keep the system sufficiently pleased with you so that it won’t reject you like a mismatched organ transplant. You’re covering yourself with feces and then running into the crowd trying to wipe the dirt off them with your hands.
So what can we do instead? Well, the dynamic I just described means that all the power has been stacked heavily in favor of status quo power structures, so it’s not an easy fix. It’s not as simple as starting a new political party or organizing more effectively, because the system is already deliberately stacked heavily against exactly those kinds of escape plans. What we’ve got to do is work way outside the system and weaken public trust in it, with the hope of awakening the masses from their MSM-induced coma and persuading them to use the power of their numbers to shrug off the plutocratic oppression machine that’s been squeezing them their entire lives.
The way to do that is with relentless acts of narrative sabotage at every opportunity, exposing the lies of the narrative matrix and reducing the public’s already low trust in the mass media to nil. We’ve got few things working to our advantage toward that end, but they are powerful. We’ve got the fact that we’ve got enthusiasm and creativity on our side, while establishment cronies are boring, artless, unfunny, permanently uninspired, and reliably several steps behind the zeitgeist. We’ve got our unprecedented ability to network and share information. And we’ve got our species’ capacity to awaken from its dreamlike relationship with mental narrative, which I believe could be the X factor hidden below the surface of the human experience which leads to the creation of a healthy world.
It’s not much, but it’s what we’ve got, and it’s a hell of a lot more effective than Obama’s recommendation of towel drying while submerged underwater.
Saturday, April 20, 2019
SC188-2
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/114975/its-2016-all-over-again
It's 2016 All Over Again. Or Is It?
The fate of the global economy rides on the answer
Conditions today mirror 2016, when growing weakness in the global economy and wobbling financial markets caused the world’s central banks to absolutely freak out.
They responded by dumping more thin-air money into the system than ever before in history. And it worked (for them at least). Economic growth stabilized; and the prices of stocks, real estate, and other assets enjoyed another three-year joyride.
Similarly, as things started getting shaky in late 2018, the same playbook was deployed. And again, we've seen stocks rocket upwards ever since.
But will the strategy actually work this time? It's unclear. And a lot is riding on the answer.
Back in 2016 the financial world was falling apart. The US dollar was spiking. Emerging market currencies were getting destroyed. The S&P 500 equities was exhibiting a classic head-and-shoulders formation, indicative of a coming plunge. The macro-economic outlook looked grim, too, with global trade slipping into contraction:
But then everything suddenly turned around, as if by magic.
Well, we now know that ‘magic’ was actually a massive quantity of monetary and fiscal stimulus pumped into the system by the world's central banking cartel.
Our concern is that the monetary and fiscal authorities are thinking that since they were “successful” back in 2016, they can repeat the same strategy here in 2019.
But can they? Maybe. Or maybe not.
If the answer is “yes,” our prediction is to expect what we got last time, just taken to more extremes: a vastly wider wealth gap between the 1% and everyone else, accelerated destruction of savers and the middle classes, and anemic GDP growth coupled with explosive further growth of global debt levels.
If the answer is “no,” a massive crash of epic proportions, unlike any most of us have ever experienced, is in store. Credit bubbles are ugly beasts. They're fun while they last but devastating when they burst. The longer they carry on, the worse the crash when it comes -- this bubble has been going on for longer than most people ever could have imagined.
2016: A Post-Mortem
It's eerie how closely recent developments resemble what took place at the start of 2016.
In 2016, there were slumping emerging markets, a slew of macro indicators pointing to a global slowdown, and equity bear markets all over the place. And then – presto! – everything reversed during one night in February 2016. It was as if nothing had ever happened.
Somehow all those fundamental macro warnings just melted away in a burst of financial market exuberance.
S&P futures took off in the overnight session between Feb 7th and the morning of February 8th as if the entire world suddenly had a change of heart:
From that moment on, the S&P started climbing to new all-time highs, practically unabated, until September 2018.
So, what happened here? What new information became available to the world’s investors in the wee late night/early morning hours of February 8th , 2016 that wasn’t available the day before?
Nothing fundamental, that’s for sure. Massive buy orders showed up in the middle of the night and it was only later that the economic data began to turn the corner.
What came first was the tremendous application of monetary, fiscal and financial stimulus. Just gobs and gobs of it. Economic recovery, such as it was, showed up later.
What you need to understand is that between 2016 and the middle of 2018 the world’s central banks opened up the floodgates here and poured the most amount of money into the system since the Global Financial Crisis began back in 2008.
In the chart above, you can see where the central banks panicked back in mid-2015. It didn't take long for their combined printing hit the highest run-rate of the entire crisis at $2.5 trillion dollars by mid-2016. They then kept the pedal to the metal clear through mid-2018. This represents by far, the largest stimulus of the entire mis-begotten Quantitative Easing experiment that began after the GFC -- printing up money from thin-air to jam into the financial markets (and thus into the portfolios of the rich).
The. Most. Money printing. Ever.
By a huge margin.
This wasn’t even remotely in line with their public statements, which were all geared towards soothing and placating the masses.
“The economy is robust” they said. “Growth is on track,” they cooed.
But behind the scenes they were hastily, and often haphazardly, dumping the largest-ever quantity of money and credit into the system the world had ever seen. Not unlike how a 5-year-old, fearing getting caught, pushes a pilfered bag of chips quickly under a nearby sofa cushion.
As mentioned frequently here at Peak Prosperity, even though a painful correction was likely avoided by these efforts, not everybody shared equally in the resulting years of continued gains:
In a system now as heavily financialized as ours is, the benefits of such extreme stimulus efforts accrue exponentially to those who own and control financial assets -- those at very tippy-top of the wealth/income distribution.
It's amazing to see how not only does the top 1% dramatically outpace the bottom 99%, but the top 0.1% leaves the top 1% in the dust. Same for the top 0.01% vs the 0.1%. And the top 0.001%? They're in a stratosphere all their own.
The developed world is quickly becoming an oligarchy. And more central bank printing only exacerbates that dynamic.
The more they prop up the system with more money printing, the more Trumps, Brexits, Yellow Vest protestors, and populist politicians we’ll see. Money printing is a political act of wealth redistribution from the bottom to the top. It’s unfair and socially destabilizing.
Even if they can't yet see the true culprit here, the masses are beginning to wake up to how badly screwed they're getting.
Until And Unless
“Until and unless,” we wrote in early 2018. We warned that "until and unless" the world’s central banks reversed course and began printing like crazy, the vast global cesspool of over-expensive bubbly financial assets would soon undergo a painful downwards re-pricing.
And start fall they did; through September 2018 up through Christmas Eve. Then, as they have done so many times, a “miracle” bottom was formed -- one that didn’t resemble a true bottom, where buyers and sellers settle in and wrestle for a while with neither side gaining ground. What we experienced instead was a very steep “V.”
A “needle bottom” if you will; an upside-down Matterhorn:
What caused this violent reversal? Some immediate return of global macro conditions to amazing awesomeness? Some new data revealing massive new sources of corporate profits?
No, none of that. It was just another $1 trillion of central bank money printing, coupled with every other conceivable option to shove additional money and credit into the system.
In a recent interview, James Grant (of Grant's Interest Rate Observer) provided his views on the Fed and other central banks and their role in backstopping every downwards wiggle in today's stock ““markets”” (emphasis mine)
Q: What would you do if you were at the helm of the world’s most powerful central bank?
A: I fear it might be too late, but to start with, I’m in favor of interest rates which are discovered in the marketplace. And, at the very short end, interest rates ought to be pitched at a level that provides some premium to the inflation rate.
So, my first order would be to give a speech saying that we are out of the business of manipulating expectations; we are out of the business of manipulating the stock market. The stock market is going where it wants to go, and if it goes down a lot, so be it. That’s not our line of work. We are in the business of securing a currency which holds its value and which provides a good medium of exchange.
Q: Sounds straightforward. But how would the financial markets react?
A: They would consider it as very radical and very unhelpful. But the way forward is to somehow reinstitute the interaction of supply and demand on Wall Street and to get the Fed out of the business of wholesale manipulation of values. Because today, the Fed is expected to intervene when things go badly and what this has given us is immense distortions.
The central banks are so terrified of the Franken-Markets they’ve created that they now intervene both directly and indirectly, overtly and covertly, to do anything and everything necessary to prevent them from ever going down again.
James Grant thinks the Fed should get out of the business of wholesale manipulation of asset prices, and we could not agree more. Its constant interventions and manipulations are terribly destructive on so many levels – societally, structurally, ecologically, and politically – that it’s worth an entire book to point them all out.
But here we are. And the Fed does not look like it's planning to change its behavior anytime soon.
This Better Work
Our macro-beef with all of this is that even if the Fed is “successful”, we all lose.
The natural end to its current policies is a tiny fraction of the population owning everything.
But even worse than that, our planet is being despoiled by this desperate quest for more fantasy wealth, represented by fantasy digits within the entirely human-contrived fantasy of our financial markets.
The "immense distortions" that James Grant mentions above lead to all sort of malinvestment that should never happen in a rational world. But as long as there's a short-term profit motive funded by endless thin-air money, there's an incentive to harvest the last tree, fish the last tuna, drain the last aquifer. And then where will we be?
If we don’t tame our addiction to endless growth(always more, more!) then we’ll simply consume ourselves out of existence, or at least to a civilization-ending conclusion.
Real wealth consists of real things. It’s health. It's the safety and security of those we care about. It's access to food and clean air and water. It's being in meaningful relationships, held lovingly in the here and now.
What we call money is a claim on wealth. But it's not real wealth in and of itself. Hopefully we can all agree that if the sun blinked out for some reason, we’d soon realize that money was never the thing of vast importance we made it out to be.
Similarly, if our ecosystems crash, we’ll learn that the pursuit of money is much less important than we currently realize. Certainly not as important as eating.
Or if we stupidly allow the gap between the wealthy and the poor to widen, we’ll soon wake up to the type of revolution that history books are full of.
The steps being taken by today's central banks are diverting us from having the conversations we really need to be engaging in. Those in power perpetuate the repeatedly disproven idea that printing money is the same thing as prosperity. Our future is bleaker for their actions, not brighter.
The younger generations are starting to figure this out in droves as they face the piling evidence that they are inheriting a world burdened by debt, pollution and serious inequality. This is something the Baby Boomers running the central banks really ought to be noticing.
Sooner or later the propping, the manipulating, the cajoling and the distorting will fail. When it does, the aftermath will be quite unpleasant.
Tragically, we could have avoided much of the coming reckoning if we’d learned the right lessons from 2000 and 2008 and allowed the bad debts and the poorly-run large banks to simply fail. The world would have shuddered for a brief period, but it would have then carried on from a much more sustainable baseline.
The wealth gap would be a fraction of what it currently is, and Trump almost certainly would not be president, Brexit not on the table, and populist movements blooming like California poppies after heavy spring rains.
But we didn't learn the right lessons. And so here we are.
In Part 2: Why This Better Work, we look closely at just how awful the fast-deteriorating macroeconomic situation is. It's very bad. GDP is falling in nearly every region of the globe, long-hot real estate markets have nosed-over, world trade volumes are shrinking, industry energy consumption is in decline -- the list goes on and on.
Left to itself, the economy would enter recession in a skinny minute to flush out the many trillions of bad debt and malinvestment that have accreted over the past decade. To prevent this from happening and to keep asset prices moving higher -- or to even simply keep them at their current ultra-expensive levels -- the central banks will need to deploy a truly mind-boggling amount of intervention.
Will they? And will the system respond the same way it did before?
And even if it does, will the 99.9% placidly subsist on even smaller crumbs as the remaining wealth is hoovered into the pockets of the top 0.1%?
If the answer to any of these questions is "no", none of us is fully prepared for what's coming.
Buckle up.
It's 2016 All Over Again. Or Is It?
The fate of the global economy rides on the answer
Conditions today mirror 2016, when growing weakness in the global economy and wobbling financial markets caused the world’s central banks to absolutely freak out.
They responded by dumping more thin-air money into the system than ever before in history. And it worked (for them at least). Economic growth stabilized; and the prices of stocks, real estate, and other assets enjoyed another three-year joyride.
Similarly, as things started getting shaky in late 2018, the same playbook was deployed. And again, we've seen stocks rocket upwards ever since.
But will the strategy actually work this time? It's unclear. And a lot is riding on the answer.
Back in 2016 the financial world was falling apart. The US dollar was spiking. Emerging market currencies were getting destroyed. The S&P 500 equities was exhibiting a classic head-and-shoulders formation, indicative of a coming plunge. The macro-economic outlook looked grim, too, with global trade slipping into contraction:
But then everything suddenly turned around, as if by magic.
Well, we now know that ‘magic’ was actually a massive quantity of monetary and fiscal stimulus pumped into the system by the world's central banking cartel.
Our concern is that the monetary and fiscal authorities are thinking that since they were “successful” back in 2016, they can repeat the same strategy here in 2019.
But can they? Maybe. Or maybe not.
If the answer is “yes,” our prediction is to expect what we got last time, just taken to more extremes: a vastly wider wealth gap between the 1% and everyone else, accelerated destruction of savers and the middle classes, and anemic GDP growth coupled with explosive further growth of global debt levels.
If the answer is “no,” a massive crash of epic proportions, unlike any most of us have ever experienced, is in store. Credit bubbles are ugly beasts. They're fun while they last but devastating when they burst. The longer they carry on, the worse the crash when it comes -- this bubble has been going on for longer than most people ever could have imagined.
2016: A Post-Mortem
It's eerie how closely recent developments resemble what took place at the start of 2016.
In 2016, there were slumping emerging markets, a slew of macro indicators pointing to a global slowdown, and equity bear markets all over the place. And then – presto! – everything reversed during one night in February 2016. It was as if nothing had ever happened.
Somehow all those fundamental macro warnings just melted away in a burst of financial market exuberance.
S&P futures took off in the overnight session between Feb 7th and the morning of February 8th as if the entire world suddenly had a change of heart:
From that moment on, the S&P started climbing to new all-time highs, practically unabated, until September 2018.
So, what happened here? What new information became available to the world’s investors in the wee late night/early morning hours of February 8th , 2016 that wasn’t available the day before?
Nothing fundamental, that’s for sure. Massive buy orders showed up in the middle of the night and it was only later that the economic data began to turn the corner.
What came first was the tremendous application of monetary, fiscal and financial stimulus. Just gobs and gobs of it. Economic recovery, such as it was, showed up later.
What you need to understand is that between 2016 and the middle of 2018 the world’s central banks opened up the floodgates here and poured the most amount of money into the system since the Global Financial Crisis began back in 2008.
In the chart above, you can see where the central banks panicked back in mid-2015. It didn't take long for their combined printing hit the highest run-rate of the entire crisis at $2.5 trillion dollars by mid-2016. They then kept the pedal to the metal clear through mid-2018. This represents by far, the largest stimulus of the entire mis-begotten Quantitative Easing experiment that began after the GFC -- printing up money from thin-air to jam into the financial markets (and thus into the portfolios of the rich).
The. Most. Money printing. Ever.
By a huge margin.
This wasn’t even remotely in line with their public statements, which were all geared towards soothing and placating the masses.
“The economy is robust” they said. “Growth is on track,” they cooed.
But behind the scenes they were hastily, and often haphazardly, dumping the largest-ever quantity of money and credit into the system the world had ever seen. Not unlike how a 5-year-old, fearing getting caught, pushes a pilfered bag of chips quickly under a nearby sofa cushion.
As mentioned frequently here at Peak Prosperity, even though a painful correction was likely avoided by these efforts, not everybody shared equally in the resulting years of continued gains:
In a system now as heavily financialized as ours is, the benefits of such extreme stimulus efforts accrue exponentially to those who own and control financial assets -- those at very tippy-top of the wealth/income distribution.
It's amazing to see how not only does the top 1% dramatically outpace the bottom 99%, but the top 0.1% leaves the top 1% in the dust. Same for the top 0.01% vs the 0.1%. And the top 0.001%? They're in a stratosphere all their own.
The developed world is quickly becoming an oligarchy. And more central bank printing only exacerbates that dynamic.
The more they prop up the system with more money printing, the more Trumps, Brexits, Yellow Vest protestors, and populist politicians we’ll see. Money printing is a political act of wealth redistribution from the bottom to the top. It’s unfair and socially destabilizing.
Even if they can't yet see the true culprit here, the masses are beginning to wake up to how badly screwed they're getting.
Until And Unless
“Until and unless,” we wrote in early 2018. We warned that "until and unless" the world’s central banks reversed course and began printing like crazy, the vast global cesspool of over-expensive bubbly financial assets would soon undergo a painful downwards re-pricing.
And start fall they did; through September 2018 up through Christmas Eve. Then, as they have done so many times, a “miracle” bottom was formed -- one that didn’t resemble a true bottom, where buyers and sellers settle in and wrestle for a while with neither side gaining ground. What we experienced instead was a very steep “V.”
A “needle bottom” if you will; an upside-down Matterhorn:
What caused this violent reversal? Some immediate return of global macro conditions to amazing awesomeness? Some new data revealing massive new sources of corporate profits?
No, none of that. It was just another $1 trillion of central bank money printing, coupled with every other conceivable option to shove additional money and credit into the system.
In a recent interview, James Grant (of Grant's Interest Rate Observer) provided his views on the Fed and other central banks and their role in backstopping every downwards wiggle in today's stock ““markets”” (emphasis mine)
Q: What would you do if you were at the helm of the world’s most powerful central bank?
A: I fear it might be too late, but to start with, I’m in favor of interest rates which are discovered in the marketplace. And, at the very short end, interest rates ought to be pitched at a level that provides some premium to the inflation rate.
So, my first order would be to give a speech saying that we are out of the business of manipulating expectations; we are out of the business of manipulating the stock market. The stock market is going where it wants to go, and if it goes down a lot, so be it. That’s not our line of work. We are in the business of securing a currency which holds its value and which provides a good medium of exchange.
Q: Sounds straightforward. But how would the financial markets react?
A: They would consider it as very radical and very unhelpful. But the way forward is to somehow reinstitute the interaction of supply and demand on Wall Street and to get the Fed out of the business of wholesale manipulation of values. Because today, the Fed is expected to intervene when things go badly and what this has given us is immense distortions.
The central banks are so terrified of the Franken-Markets they’ve created that they now intervene both directly and indirectly, overtly and covertly, to do anything and everything necessary to prevent them from ever going down again.
James Grant thinks the Fed should get out of the business of wholesale manipulation of asset prices, and we could not agree more. Its constant interventions and manipulations are terribly destructive on so many levels – societally, structurally, ecologically, and politically – that it’s worth an entire book to point them all out.
But here we are. And the Fed does not look like it's planning to change its behavior anytime soon.
This Better Work
Our macro-beef with all of this is that even if the Fed is “successful”, we all lose.
The natural end to its current policies is a tiny fraction of the population owning everything.
But even worse than that, our planet is being despoiled by this desperate quest for more fantasy wealth, represented by fantasy digits within the entirely human-contrived fantasy of our financial markets.
The "immense distortions" that James Grant mentions above lead to all sort of malinvestment that should never happen in a rational world. But as long as there's a short-term profit motive funded by endless thin-air money, there's an incentive to harvest the last tree, fish the last tuna, drain the last aquifer. And then where will we be?
If we don’t tame our addiction to endless growth(always more, more!) then we’ll simply consume ourselves out of existence, or at least to a civilization-ending conclusion.
Real wealth consists of real things. It’s health. It's the safety and security of those we care about. It's access to food and clean air and water. It's being in meaningful relationships, held lovingly in the here and now.
What we call money is a claim on wealth. But it's not real wealth in and of itself. Hopefully we can all agree that if the sun blinked out for some reason, we’d soon realize that money was never the thing of vast importance we made it out to be.
Similarly, if our ecosystems crash, we’ll learn that the pursuit of money is much less important than we currently realize. Certainly not as important as eating.
Or if we stupidly allow the gap between the wealthy and the poor to widen, we’ll soon wake up to the type of revolution that history books are full of.
The steps being taken by today's central banks are diverting us from having the conversations we really need to be engaging in. Those in power perpetuate the repeatedly disproven idea that printing money is the same thing as prosperity. Our future is bleaker for their actions, not brighter.
The younger generations are starting to figure this out in droves as they face the piling evidence that they are inheriting a world burdened by debt, pollution and serious inequality. This is something the Baby Boomers running the central banks really ought to be noticing.
Sooner or later the propping, the manipulating, the cajoling and the distorting will fail. When it does, the aftermath will be quite unpleasant.
Tragically, we could have avoided much of the coming reckoning if we’d learned the right lessons from 2000 and 2008 and allowed the bad debts and the poorly-run large banks to simply fail. The world would have shuddered for a brief period, but it would have then carried on from a much more sustainable baseline.
The wealth gap would be a fraction of what it currently is, and Trump almost certainly would not be president, Brexit not on the table, and populist movements blooming like California poppies after heavy spring rains.
But we didn't learn the right lessons. And so here we are.
In Part 2: Why This Better Work, we look closely at just how awful the fast-deteriorating macroeconomic situation is. It's very bad. GDP is falling in nearly every region of the globe, long-hot real estate markets have nosed-over, world trade volumes are shrinking, industry energy consumption is in decline -- the list goes on and on.
Left to itself, the economy would enter recession in a skinny minute to flush out the many trillions of bad debt and malinvestment that have accreted over the past decade. To prevent this from happening and to keep asset prices moving higher -- or to even simply keep them at their current ultra-expensive levels -- the central banks will need to deploy a truly mind-boggling amount of intervention.
Will they? And will the system respond the same way it did before?
And even if it does, will the 99.9% placidly subsist on even smaller crumbs as the remaining wealth is hoovered into the pockets of the top 0.1%?
If the answer to any of these questions is "no", none of us is fully prepared for what's coming.
Buckle up.
Friday, April 19, 2019
SC188-1
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/03/arctic-permafrost-no-longer-freezes-even-in-winter/
Arctic Permafrost No Longer Freezes … Even in Winter
Global warming is starting to hit hard like there’s no tomorrow, and at current rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, there may not be a tomorrow, as emissions continue setting new records year-by-year, expected to hit a 62-year record in 2019. So much for the Paris 2015 climate agreement!
The most sensitive areas to global warming, (1) the Arctic (almost all of its multi-year ice, or old ice, is gone- already melted), and (2) East Antarctica, the coldest spot in the planet… strangely melting, and (3) Siberian ground that “no longer freezes in winter” are three occurrences that should keep world leaders up late into the night, blankly staring at the ceiling.
In fact, over the past couple of decades global warming has groomed ultra-dangerous climate upheavals that could destroy sizeable swaths of civilization. But how soon remains an open question?
Moreover, there are several ecosystem flashpoints with enough potential to massively destroy large segments of life right now, which, in fact, is already happening in real time, and scientifically documented, with nearly total loss of arthropods in the tropical rain forests of Mexico and Puerto Rico as a result of excessive global warming, which can destroy populations of arthropods by inhibiting reproduction and disorienting internal organ functionality (Climate-Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
According to the scientists that conducted the 40-year rainforests studies in Mexico and Puerto Rico, rainforests temperatures exceeded the dreaded 2° C post-industrial guardrail (Maybe the IPCC is on to something by insisting the world must not allow temps to exceed 2° C, post-industrial).
Another ecosystem flash point of major concern is the failure of Arctic ground to freeze— even in the winter, in turn, exposing permafrost to thawing. This is unheard of, and it defies claims by many Republicans in Congress that say climate change/global warming is a hoax, or they often times fall back on the time-worn hackneyed statement: “The climate always changes.”
Albeit, failing to recognize the several ominous threats of global warming, especially now that the “ground cover protecting permafrost from thawing is not freezing in the Arctic wintertime” is comparable to applying for lifetime membership in the Flat Earth Society. After all, some things in life are so bloody obvious that denial is tantamount to imbecility or brainlessness, traits that are not DNA inclusive, rather symbolic of a deadness bordering on lunacy.
If not global warming, then what’s behind Arctic ground not freezing in the dead of winter, exposing permafrost to thaw, and East Antarctica, the world’s coldest spot, starting to melt?
In that regard, National Geographic ran a story a couple of months ago entitled: “Some Arctic Ground No Longer Freezing— Even in Winter” d/d August 20th, 2018.
Here’s a snippet: “Could a thaw of permafrost begin decades sooner than many people expect in some of the Arctic’s coldest, most carbon-rich regions, releasing trapped greenhouse gases (GHG) that could accelerate human-caused climate change?”
Ipso facto, signage needs to be posted in northern Siberia with big bold red lettering: “Caution… Area Subject to Massive Release of Greenhouse Gases and Runaway Global Warming!”
Still, smart-alecky people may query: Runaway Global Warming (RGW), so what? Answer: Check out Australia at year-end 2018 when all-time sustaining record temperatures brought the destruction of biblical proportions, melted highways, thousands of bats deathly falling in city streets, massive losses of fishes, and fruit that “cooked from the inside out.” Yes, believe it or not, cooked from the inside out! But, that’s only a sampler of what’s in store with full-scale planetary RGW. It’ll take one’s breath away… literally!
RGW is not outside the realm of possibility, according to National Geographic, there’s plenty of carbon trapped in permafrost: “Every winter across the Arctic, the top few inches or feet of soil and rich plant matter freezes up before thawing again in summer. Beneath this active layer of ground extending hundreds of feet deeper sits continuously frozen earth called permafrost, which, in places, has stayed frozen for millennia.”
But the ground cover for permafrost did not freeze-up in a region of the Arctic where temperatures typically dip to -40° F, and where permafrost has always remained frozen since time immemorial.
That same article goes on to describe some details about the discovery of ground cover for permafrost not freezing in winter: “The discovery has not been peer-reviewed or published and represents limited data from one spot in one year. But with measurements from another scientist nearby and one an ocean away appearing to support the Zimovs’ findings, some Arctic experts are weighing a troubling question: Could a thaw of permafrost begin decades sooner than many people expect in some of the Arctic’s coldest, most carbon-rich regions, releasing trapped greenhouse gases that could accelerate human-caused climate change?”
Is that how Runaway Global Warming starts? Probably!
Not only that, but throughout the Arctic, change is happening lightening fast in geological terms, e.g., 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Norway temperatures reached 90°F this past spring. In other words, the Arctic is cookin’.
Nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere landmass sits on permafrost trapped in frozen soil that contains twice the amount of carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, which is a surefire deadly formula for trouble.
The jury is still out on the National Geographic article. Hopefully, it is not a major trend throughout the Arctic, but ominously, it’s popping up in other Arctic permafrost regions thousands of miles away.
To that point, thousands of miles from Siberia, Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at the University of Alaska/Fairbanks found freeze-ups of permafrost shifting from mid-January to as late as March, happening since 2014.
Additionally, from National Geographic: “It’s worrisome,’ says Sue Natali, a permafrost expert, also with Woods Hole, who saw an active layer not re-freeze recently during a research trip to Alaska’s Yukon region. ‘When we see things happening that hasn’t happened in the lifetime of the scientists studying them, that should be a concern.”
The stakes in the Arctic are high. It’s common knowledge that if permafrost layers are consistently exposed to thawing, consequences can be hard, fast and not pleasant. Counter-intuitively, once it’s unfrozen, permafrost can potentially release GHG year-round, not only in summertime. And, that’s a huge problem without a solution, no solutions at all, unless well-beforehand Homo sapiens halt GHG emissions. No chance.
Arctic Permafrost No Longer Freezes … Even in Winter
Global warming is starting to hit hard like there’s no tomorrow, and at current rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, there may not be a tomorrow, as emissions continue setting new records year-by-year, expected to hit a 62-year record in 2019. So much for the Paris 2015 climate agreement!
The most sensitive areas to global warming, (1) the Arctic (almost all of its multi-year ice, or old ice, is gone- already melted), and (2) East Antarctica, the coldest spot in the planet… strangely melting, and (3) Siberian ground that “no longer freezes in winter” are three occurrences that should keep world leaders up late into the night, blankly staring at the ceiling.
In fact, over the past couple of decades global warming has groomed ultra-dangerous climate upheavals that could destroy sizeable swaths of civilization. But how soon remains an open question?
Moreover, there are several ecosystem flashpoints with enough potential to massively destroy large segments of life right now, which, in fact, is already happening in real time, and scientifically documented, with nearly total loss of arthropods in the tropical rain forests of Mexico and Puerto Rico as a result of excessive global warming, which can destroy populations of arthropods by inhibiting reproduction and disorienting internal organ functionality (Climate-Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
According to the scientists that conducted the 40-year rainforests studies in Mexico and Puerto Rico, rainforests temperatures exceeded the dreaded 2° C post-industrial guardrail (Maybe the IPCC is on to something by insisting the world must not allow temps to exceed 2° C, post-industrial).
Another ecosystem flash point of major concern is the failure of Arctic ground to freeze— even in the winter, in turn, exposing permafrost to thawing. This is unheard of, and it defies claims by many Republicans in Congress that say climate change/global warming is a hoax, or they often times fall back on the time-worn hackneyed statement: “The climate always changes.”
Albeit, failing to recognize the several ominous threats of global warming, especially now that the “ground cover protecting permafrost from thawing is not freezing in the Arctic wintertime” is comparable to applying for lifetime membership in the Flat Earth Society. After all, some things in life are so bloody obvious that denial is tantamount to imbecility or brainlessness, traits that are not DNA inclusive, rather symbolic of a deadness bordering on lunacy.
If not global warming, then what’s behind Arctic ground not freezing in the dead of winter, exposing permafrost to thaw, and East Antarctica, the world’s coldest spot, starting to melt?
In that regard, National Geographic ran a story a couple of months ago entitled: “Some Arctic Ground No Longer Freezing— Even in Winter” d/d August 20th, 2018.
Here’s a snippet: “Could a thaw of permafrost begin decades sooner than many people expect in some of the Arctic’s coldest, most carbon-rich regions, releasing trapped greenhouse gases (GHG) that could accelerate human-caused climate change?”
Ipso facto, signage needs to be posted in northern Siberia with big bold red lettering: “Caution… Area Subject to Massive Release of Greenhouse Gases and Runaway Global Warming!”
Still, smart-alecky people may query: Runaway Global Warming (RGW), so what? Answer: Check out Australia at year-end 2018 when all-time sustaining record temperatures brought the destruction of biblical proportions, melted highways, thousands of bats deathly falling in city streets, massive losses of fishes, and fruit that “cooked from the inside out.” Yes, believe it or not, cooked from the inside out! But, that’s only a sampler of what’s in store with full-scale planetary RGW. It’ll take one’s breath away… literally!
RGW is not outside the realm of possibility, according to National Geographic, there’s plenty of carbon trapped in permafrost: “Every winter across the Arctic, the top few inches or feet of soil and rich plant matter freezes up before thawing again in summer. Beneath this active layer of ground extending hundreds of feet deeper sits continuously frozen earth called permafrost, which, in places, has stayed frozen for millennia.”
But the ground cover for permafrost did not freeze-up in a region of the Arctic where temperatures typically dip to -40° F, and where permafrost has always remained frozen since time immemorial.
That same article goes on to describe some details about the discovery of ground cover for permafrost not freezing in winter: “The discovery has not been peer-reviewed or published and represents limited data from one spot in one year. But with measurements from another scientist nearby and one an ocean away appearing to support the Zimovs’ findings, some Arctic experts are weighing a troubling question: Could a thaw of permafrost begin decades sooner than many people expect in some of the Arctic’s coldest, most carbon-rich regions, releasing trapped greenhouse gases that could accelerate human-caused climate change?”
Is that how Runaway Global Warming starts? Probably!
Not only that, but throughout the Arctic, change is happening lightening fast in geological terms, e.g., 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Norway temperatures reached 90°F this past spring. In other words, the Arctic is cookin’.
Nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere landmass sits on permafrost trapped in frozen soil that contains twice the amount of carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, which is a surefire deadly formula for trouble.
The jury is still out on the National Geographic article. Hopefully, it is not a major trend throughout the Arctic, but ominously, it’s popping up in other Arctic permafrost regions thousands of miles away.
To that point, thousands of miles from Siberia, Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at the University of Alaska/Fairbanks found freeze-ups of permafrost shifting from mid-January to as late as March, happening since 2014.
Additionally, from National Geographic: “It’s worrisome,’ says Sue Natali, a permafrost expert, also with Woods Hole, who saw an active layer not re-freeze recently during a research trip to Alaska’s Yukon region. ‘When we see things happening that hasn’t happened in the lifetime of the scientists studying them, that should be a concern.”
The stakes in the Arctic are high. It’s common knowledge that if permafrost layers are consistently exposed to thawing, consequences can be hard, fast and not pleasant. Counter-intuitively, once it’s unfrozen, permafrost can potentially release GHG year-round, not only in summertime. And, that’s a huge problem without a solution, no solutions at all, unless well-beforehand Homo sapiens halt GHG emissions. No chance.
Thursday, April 18, 2019
SC187-15
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/12/assange-arrest-a-warning-from-history/
Assange Arrest a Warning from History
The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.
That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.
But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.
Moreno: A Latin American Judas.
Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.
The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sow the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization.” The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.
Assange’s principal media tormentor, The Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years.” The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.
With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.
Revealing Homicidal Colonial Wars
When Assange was still trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, Harding joined police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh.” The Guardian then published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.
But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangled web,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published …. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden.”
These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the exposé of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.
The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.
When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.
If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what The Guardian calls truthful “things,” what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?
Even the propagandist Harding could be at risk.
What is to stop the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. The list is long.
David McCraw, lead lawyer of The New York Times, wrote: “I think the prosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”
Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalized by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.
In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.
Journalism: a Major Threat
Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defense in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.
The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”
What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake — if there are others — are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?
In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.
She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.
“Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia …. When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.”
And did. The rest, she might have added, is history.
Assange Arrest a Warning from History
The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.
That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.
But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.
Moreno: A Latin American Judas.
Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.
The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sow the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization.” The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.
Assange’s principal media tormentor, The Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years.” The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.
With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.
Revealing Homicidal Colonial Wars
When Assange was still trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, Harding joined police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh.” The Guardian then published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.
But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangled web,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published …. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden.”
These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the exposé of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.
The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.
When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.
If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what The Guardian calls truthful “things,” what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?
Even the propagandist Harding could be at risk.
What is to stop the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. The list is long.
David McCraw, lead lawyer of The New York Times, wrote: “I think the prosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”
Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalized by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.
In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.
Journalism: a Major Threat
Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defense in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.
The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”
What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake — if there are others — are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?
In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.
She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.
“Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia …. When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.”
And did. The rest, she might have added, is history.
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