https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/07/03/seriously-get-the-hell-out-of-afghanistan/
Seriously, Get The Hell Out Of Afghanistan
With overwhelming bipartisan support, the House Armed Services Committee has added a Liz Cheney-spearheaded amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which throws severe roadblocks in the Trump administration’s proposed scale-down of US military presence in Afghanistan and Germany.
As The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald notes, both parties advancing the amendment cited in their arguments the completely unsubstantiated intelligence leak that was recently published by credulous mass media reporters alleging that Russia has paid bounties to Taliban fighters for killing the occupying forces in Afghanistan. Yet another western imperialist agenda once again facilitated by unforgivably egregious journalistic malpractice in the mass media.
Every aspect of this development is enraging.
The mass media have continued to add to their mountain of Gish gallop fallacies promoting this narrative with a new Daily Beast report citing former senior Taliban figure Mullah Manan Niazi who asserts that “The Taliban have been paid by Russian intelligence for attacks on U.S. forces—and on ISIS forces—in Afghanistan from 2014 up to the present.” The Beast’s own article admits that its source has severe conflicts of interest and is believed to be a CIA asset by Taliban leadership, and that Niazi provided no evidence of any kind for his claim or any further details whatsoever.
These flimsy, poorly-sourced allegations are being hammered into mainstream liberal consciousness on a daily basis now in the exact same way the discredited Russiagate psyop was, and just like with Russiagate the narrative they are being used to shape helps advance military expansionism and new cold war escalations which just so happen to fit perfectly into pre-existing geostrategic agendas of planetary domination.
The way mainstream news outlets consistently refuse to account for a fact so obvious and indisputable as intelligence agencies being known liars should by itself be enough to discredit the entire institution of mass news reporting. Yet here we are with these reports being treated as established fact throughout the entire political/media class and down through the entire population of propagandized rank-and-file citizenry.
The Afghanistan Papers established conclusively that the occupation has been unwinnable and without a clear picture of what winning would even look like from the very beginning, and that this fact has been hidden from the world by systematic deceit for two decades. The revelation was in the news for a day and then quickly memory holed without having any meaningful impact on the dominant narrative about Afghanistan, and now the mainstream consensus is that even trying to reduce the number of troops there is a hazardous and outlandish notion.
This is because the mainstream consensus is shaped not by facts, but by narrative. We see this in the way the fact-filled Afghanistan Papers have played no role in shaping the dominant narrative about what should be done about the nineteen-year occupation, and we see it in the way the fact-free “bounty” narrative is shaping public opinion and determining US foreign policy. The propagandists who manufacture consent for imperialist agendas understand that truth and facts play far less of a role in what the propagandized consider important than does mindless repetition and emotion.
The Empire Files has an absolutely phenomenal mini-documentary on the Afghanistan occupation which came out the other day, and everyone should watch it. Abby Martin quickly breaks down the geostrategic, resource control, and military-industrial complex agendas which are advanced by this interminable war, the deceit and depravity which went into initiating and maintaining it, and the devastating toll it has taken on the Afghan people. I strongly encourage my readers to give it a view when you get the chance.
The continued Afghanistan occupation is like if the police stormed a house, shot a bunch of people, realized they got the wrong house and they’d never find the guy they were looking for by staying there, stayed anyway, moved in, and then years later said they can’t move out because they heard a rumor that the neighbors are trying to make them leave.
In a sane world it would be the violent invasion and occupation of sovereign nations which elicits outrage and opposition from elected officials and intense skepticism and critical reporting from prominent journalists. In today’s propaganda-maddened society we get the exact opposite: the invasions and occupations are treated as the normal default position and any attempt to end them is regarded as outlandish.
This cannot continue. We must find a way to awaken from the brainwashing and force it to end. Anyone who works to prevent this from happening is an enemy of human progress.
....
Excellent video about US involvement in Afghanistan
" Afghanistan War Exposed: An Imperial Conspiracy "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2157&v=C3LFbOSPfrE&feature=emb_logo
Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Monday, July 6, 2020
SC214-14
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-china-war-possible/5717783
The Unthinkable: Is a US-China War Possible? US War Ships in the South China Sea. A New Era of “Great Power Competition”
The US is waging undeclared war on China by other means — aiming to undermine its growing prominence on the world stage.
Pompeo falsely calling China’s new national security law “an affront to all nations,” his endless war of words on the country, Trump’s FCC designation of Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE as “national security threats,” and other hostile US actions against Beijing are a prescription for continued deterioration of bilateral relations or something worse — possible direct confrontation ahead.
Earlier this year, Trump regime war secretary Esper threatened China, saying:
The US is engaged in a new “era of ‘great power competition,’ and that means we need to focus more on high intensity warfare going forward.”
Indicating that greater numbers of US forces will be deployed in the Asia/Pacific, he said Washington’s “longterm challenges are China No. 1 and Russia No. 2,” adding:
“(W)hat we see happening out there is a China that continues to grow its military strength, its economic power, its commercial activity, and it’s doing so, in many ways, illicitly (sic) — or it’s using the international rules-based order against us to continue this growth, to acquire technology, and to do the things that really undermine our sovereignty (sic), that undermine the rule of law (sic), that really question (its) commitment to human rights (sic).”
Omitted from his remarks was that China, Russia, and other nations on the US target list for regime change pursue world peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other countries, confrontation with none.
Their aims are polar opposite how the US operates, seeking dominance over other nations by pressure, bullying, or brute force.
It’s waging permanent wars on targeted countries by hot and/or other means.
The latter rages against China, risking things turning hot by accident or design.
What’s unthinkable between two nuclear powers is possible, a frightening prospect for what could lie ahead.
Ramping up US military forces in the Asia/Pacific to “compete with China” is a euphemism for escalating cold war that could turn hot.
In January 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping said
“(a)ll military units must correctly understand major national security and development trends, and strengthen their sense of unexpected hardship, crisis and battle,” adding:
“The world is facing a period of major changes never seen in a century, and China is still in an important period of strategic opportunity for development.”
Xi ordered stepped up military training and exercises, saying China’s armed forces must “prepare for a comprehensive military struggle from a new starting point”, adding:
“Preparation for war and combat must be deepened to ensure an efficient response in times of emergency.”
The threat to China’s national security from the US is ominously real.
Provocations by Washington could escalate to something more serious.
On July 3, Trump regime Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy director Peter Navarro falsely claimed the following:
“I want everybody right here today, as the day before America’s Independence Day, to understand where this virus started — with the Chinese Communist Party that is making us stay locked in our homes and lose our jobs (sic).”
“They spawned the virus (sic). They hid the virus (sic). They sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals over here to seed and spread the virus (sic),” adding:
“While they were preventing any domestic travel from Wuhan to Beijing or Shanghai, locking down their transportation network, they freely sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals on aircraft to go around the world” to spread the virus (sic).”
Not a shred of evidence backs Navarro’s outrageous claim.
Polar opposite it true. China helped and continues to help scores of nations combat COVID-19 outbreaks, including by supplying personal protective equipment (PPE).
A previous article suggested that the SARS-Cov-2 virus is a made-in-the-USA bioweapon.
In all its preemptive wars on nations threatening no one, the US uses chemical, biological, radiological, and other banned weapons.
In March, Pompeo called COVID-19 “a live (military) exercise.”
Was it a Freudian slip or a damning revelation? Trump reportedly responded to his remark, saying:
“I wish you would have told us.”
The Trump regime’s misnamed “Wuhan virus” most likely originated in a US biolab, Fort Detrick, MD the likely facility.
Evidence shows that the SARS-Cov-2 virus that produces COVID-19 disease originated in the US last summer.
It showed up in Europe before reported outbreaks in China last December.
US stoked tensions with China are at a fever pitch.
In late June, National Institute for South China Sea Studies president Wu Shicun said Sino/US distrust led to hundreds of “track one” intergovernmental communication channels shutting down.
A separate report indicated that communications between the Pentagon and China’s military declined markedly since 2018.
Wu noted that “the risks of conflict are rising, especially after the near-collision between the USS Decatur guided-missile destroyer and China’s destroyer the Lanzhou in September (2018) in the South China Sea.”
At the time, Beijing blamed the US for what it called “provocative actions.”
Deteriorating bilateral relations continue, mutual distrust increasing.
US South China Sea military exercises close to its waters are highly provocative.
The presence of US forces in parts of the world not its own heighten tensions.
In the South China Sea, they risk confrontation between two nuclear powers.
A breakdown in Sino/US communications increases the danger.
For the first time since the pre-1990 Cold War ended, three US carrier groups are patrolling Asia/Pacific waters.
The US Pacific Fleet said its forward-deployed submarines are conducting operations in the Western Pacific.
On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported that USS aircraft carriers Reagan and Nimitz, along with four other US warships, are holding “some of the (Pentagon’s) largest exercises in recent years in the South China Sea,” beginning July 4.
Citing US officials, their purpose is “to challenge what they called Beijing’s unlawful territorial claims (sic).”
It’s the first time since 2014 that two US carriers and other warships conducted South China Sea drills close to Chinese waters.
USS Ronald Reagan strike-force commander Admiral George Wikoff said the following:
“We’re really operating at a higher tempo and simulating a higher end of combat power than we would typically do in a shorter length exercise,” adding:
“We’re flying around the clock, hundreds of sorties a day in a 24-hour period.”
Reportedly Chinese military officials haven’t met with their US Indo/Pacific Command counterparts since 2017.
While it’s unclear where things are heading, the risk of a clash between two nuclear super-powers is ominously real.
Instead of stepping back from the brink in the Asia/Pacific, the US continues to heighten tensions — risking confrontation with a nation able to hit back hard if attacked.
A Final Comment
Addressing the issue of whether Sino/US trade ties can avert hot war last May, China’s Global Times said the following:
“(I)n light of relentless hostility from Washington, there is…a sobering realization among many in China that the bilateral relationship with the US has reached a point of no return from which rivalry and confrontation will overtake constructive engagement as the US’ desperation to cling onto its remaining global strength and influence will only intensify with the rapid rise of China.”
Whether this causes continued political, economic, technological, and trade rivalry alone or heads toward military confrontation ahead remains unknown.
The Unthinkable: Is a US-China War Possible? US War Ships in the South China Sea. A New Era of “Great Power Competition”
The US is waging undeclared war on China by other means — aiming to undermine its growing prominence on the world stage.
Pompeo falsely calling China’s new national security law “an affront to all nations,” his endless war of words on the country, Trump’s FCC designation of Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE as “national security threats,” and other hostile US actions against Beijing are a prescription for continued deterioration of bilateral relations or something worse — possible direct confrontation ahead.
Earlier this year, Trump regime war secretary Esper threatened China, saying:
The US is engaged in a new “era of ‘great power competition,’ and that means we need to focus more on high intensity warfare going forward.”
Indicating that greater numbers of US forces will be deployed in the Asia/Pacific, he said Washington’s “longterm challenges are China No. 1 and Russia No. 2,” adding:
“(W)hat we see happening out there is a China that continues to grow its military strength, its economic power, its commercial activity, and it’s doing so, in many ways, illicitly (sic) — or it’s using the international rules-based order against us to continue this growth, to acquire technology, and to do the things that really undermine our sovereignty (sic), that undermine the rule of law (sic), that really question (its) commitment to human rights (sic).”
Omitted from his remarks was that China, Russia, and other nations on the US target list for regime change pursue world peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other countries, confrontation with none.
Their aims are polar opposite how the US operates, seeking dominance over other nations by pressure, bullying, or brute force.
It’s waging permanent wars on targeted countries by hot and/or other means.
The latter rages against China, risking things turning hot by accident or design.
What’s unthinkable between two nuclear powers is possible, a frightening prospect for what could lie ahead.
Ramping up US military forces in the Asia/Pacific to “compete with China” is a euphemism for escalating cold war that could turn hot.
In January 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping said
“(a)ll military units must correctly understand major national security and development trends, and strengthen their sense of unexpected hardship, crisis and battle,” adding:
“The world is facing a period of major changes never seen in a century, and China is still in an important period of strategic opportunity for development.”
Xi ordered stepped up military training and exercises, saying China’s armed forces must “prepare for a comprehensive military struggle from a new starting point”, adding:
“Preparation for war and combat must be deepened to ensure an efficient response in times of emergency.”
The threat to China’s national security from the US is ominously real.
Provocations by Washington could escalate to something more serious.
On July 3, Trump regime Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy director Peter Navarro falsely claimed the following:
“I want everybody right here today, as the day before America’s Independence Day, to understand where this virus started — with the Chinese Communist Party that is making us stay locked in our homes and lose our jobs (sic).”
“They spawned the virus (sic). They hid the virus (sic). They sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals over here to seed and spread the virus (sic),” adding:
“While they were preventing any domestic travel from Wuhan to Beijing or Shanghai, locking down their transportation network, they freely sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals on aircraft to go around the world” to spread the virus (sic).”
Not a shred of evidence backs Navarro’s outrageous claim.
Polar opposite it true. China helped and continues to help scores of nations combat COVID-19 outbreaks, including by supplying personal protective equipment (PPE).
A previous article suggested that the SARS-Cov-2 virus is a made-in-the-USA bioweapon.
In all its preemptive wars on nations threatening no one, the US uses chemical, biological, radiological, and other banned weapons.
In March, Pompeo called COVID-19 “a live (military) exercise.”
Was it a Freudian slip or a damning revelation? Trump reportedly responded to his remark, saying:
“I wish you would have told us.”
The Trump regime’s misnamed “Wuhan virus” most likely originated in a US biolab, Fort Detrick, MD the likely facility.
Evidence shows that the SARS-Cov-2 virus that produces COVID-19 disease originated in the US last summer.
It showed up in Europe before reported outbreaks in China last December.
US stoked tensions with China are at a fever pitch.
In late June, National Institute for South China Sea Studies president Wu Shicun said Sino/US distrust led to hundreds of “track one” intergovernmental communication channels shutting down.
A separate report indicated that communications between the Pentagon and China’s military declined markedly since 2018.
Wu noted that “the risks of conflict are rising, especially after the near-collision between the USS Decatur guided-missile destroyer and China’s destroyer the Lanzhou in September (2018) in the South China Sea.”
At the time, Beijing blamed the US for what it called “provocative actions.”
Deteriorating bilateral relations continue, mutual distrust increasing.
US South China Sea military exercises close to its waters are highly provocative.
The presence of US forces in parts of the world not its own heighten tensions.
In the South China Sea, they risk confrontation between two nuclear powers.
A breakdown in Sino/US communications increases the danger.
For the first time since the pre-1990 Cold War ended, three US carrier groups are patrolling Asia/Pacific waters.
The US Pacific Fleet said its forward-deployed submarines are conducting operations in the Western Pacific.
On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported that USS aircraft carriers Reagan and Nimitz, along with four other US warships, are holding “some of the (Pentagon’s) largest exercises in recent years in the South China Sea,” beginning July 4.
Citing US officials, their purpose is “to challenge what they called Beijing’s unlawful territorial claims (sic).”
It’s the first time since 2014 that two US carriers and other warships conducted South China Sea drills close to Chinese waters.
USS Ronald Reagan strike-force commander Admiral George Wikoff said the following:
“We’re really operating at a higher tempo and simulating a higher end of combat power than we would typically do in a shorter length exercise,” adding:
“We’re flying around the clock, hundreds of sorties a day in a 24-hour period.”
Reportedly Chinese military officials haven’t met with their US Indo/Pacific Command counterparts since 2017.
While it’s unclear where things are heading, the risk of a clash between two nuclear super-powers is ominously real.
Instead of stepping back from the brink in the Asia/Pacific, the US continues to heighten tensions — risking confrontation with a nation able to hit back hard if attacked.
A Final Comment
Addressing the issue of whether Sino/US trade ties can avert hot war last May, China’s Global Times said the following:
“(I)n light of relentless hostility from Washington, there is…a sobering realization among many in China that the bilateral relationship with the US has reached a point of no return from which rivalry and confrontation will overtake constructive engagement as the US’ desperation to cling onto its remaining global strength and influence will only intensify with the rapid rise of China.”
Whether this causes continued political, economic, technological, and trade rivalry alone or heads toward military confrontation ahead remains unknown.
Sunday, July 5, 2020
SC214-13
https://scheerpost.com/2020/07/02/fourth-of-july-musings-the-curse-of-exceptionalism-and-the-perils-of-patriotism/
Fourth of July Musings: The Curse of Exceptionalism and the Perils of Patriotism
Our messianic belief that we are the chosen nation has been disastrous for so many here and abroad.
Once again, this Fourth of July, Americans will celebrate — to the unwitting militarist racist tune that is the “Star Spangled Banner” — more than just the nation’s Independence Day. Though most folks will, if at a reasonable social distance, focus more on the backyard beer and brats, U.S. jingoism and exceptionalism will invariably be on the menu.
That last sentiment, particularly amidst the COVID- and mass protest-exposing era of forever war at home and abroad, deserves a closer and critical look. For exceptionalism is truly a national disease that ravages American bodies and democratic institutions alike. This malignancy must be named and shamed in pursuit of precisely the “participatory patriotism” the holiday purports to celebrate. As the (late) man said, “Always look to the language;” so let us begin there:
A shining “City upon a Hill;” possessed with the power to “begin the world over again;” imbued with a “Manifest Destiny;” destined to “make the world safe for democracy;” representing, ultimately, a singularly “indispensable nation.” These are the self-styled musings from a country with a near-clinical collective Messiah complex. So diagnosed, the United States, predictably, would never countenance competition from any another power claiming even a fraction of similar self-righteousness. Indeed, in the past, the U.S. has gone to war — hot or cold — with others who dared.
It is now finally fashionable to utter the relevant sobriquet for America’s historical metaphysics and its consequent behavior: exceptionalism. Taking these quoted descriptors briefly in turn, what is striking is the wide temporal span of the grandiose pronouncements, and the otherwise heterogeneity of the vocalizers.
In sequence, beginning 145 years before the U.S. republic was even founded, for the sources of these quotes we have a Puritan religious zealot (John Winthrop, 1630); followed by an outspoken atheist of decidedly radical and professional revolutionary bent (Thomas Paine, 1776); then a Democratic Party hack of a newspaper columnist (John O’Sullivan, 1839); next the first Republican president who — supposedly single-handedly — freed four million African-American slaves (Abraham Lincoln, 1862); proceeded by an ostensibly progressive internationalist president who also happened to carry the profound racism of his Virginia roots (Woodrow Wilson, 1917); and finally, the last phrase was — and is — thrown around by a range of academics, pundits, and political leaders in the years since World War II ended in 1945. The latter announcers include the nation’s first female secretary of state, Madeline Albright, a purported liberal who also defended (“worth it“) U.S.-conceived UN sanctions on Iraq even if they may have killed hundreds of thousands of children as collateral damage.
Thus, American exceptionalism — which approaches messianism — has always been a demonstrably bipartisan and diffuse enterprise. However, exceptionalist national entities typically, perhaps necessarily, exhibit behaviors characterized by universalism, triumphalism and chauvinism. A nation such as the U.S., conceived and founded upon assumptions of its anointed status as model and mission — as much as tangible state — slid seamlessly into assertions of the global-universalist applicability of its values and political systems.
That those same vague and oft-divisive values were always contested at home rarely gave government or populace much pause or tempered the desire to export them abroad. The results were decidedly mixed, and, in countless cases tragic for the recipients of American political, economic, and cultural largesse.
When the United States met with undeniably profound successes, due to the combination of inherent geographical and natural resource blessings, a prolific populace, and perennially divided hemispheric challengers — leading to what historian C. Vann Woodward dubbed a long “era of free security” — its response tilted towards triumphalism. America’s status as uniquely chosen — whether attributable to divine will or its secularly sacralized inerrant constitution — was thereby reinforced and vindicated.
From this remarkable place of self-righteous confidence, it was never a long way to policy chauvinism. Those intransigents less willing to bend to America’s inspired universalist mission — whether domestic dissidents or equally nationalist foreigners — were characterized as either unenlightened or downright evil, or both. Whatever the framing, these people were ripe for conversion — by the sword if necessary.
Such universalist, triumphalist, and chauvinist outgrowths of American exceptionalism were almost never formulated in these precise terms, and normally rather paternalistically couched as humanitarian and necessary for the collective-good. The language, justifications, and eventually apologia was typically of the “[white] father knows best” variety. Nonetheless, in practice, the results were all too often counted in millions of deaths at home and abroad, and the sentencing of exponentially more lives to second-class status.
No doubt, for a more privileged strata — which undeniably expanded, if haltingly, through the centuries — the development and decisions of the United States offered unprecedented freedoms and material affluence. Nor, it must be said, was America the lone nefarious actor on the world historical scene. Yet, as a consequence of its increasingly remarkable, and ultimately singular power — as well as its persistently benevolent justifications — here there was something uniquely American to speak of.
At root, my forthcoming book — and postwar life’s work — is about that dark side of American exceptionalism. It recounts four centuries worth of a collective — and distinctly human — dissonance on a typically immense American scale. Therefore, in a real sense, this is a history of a self-conscious republic that from its onset walked and talked a whole lot like something far less noble or democratic.
The sordid side of exceptionalism manifested both at home and abroad. National and international “others” were repeatedly and persistently relegated to political and cultural colonies of both internal and external varieties. This need not — though it often did — present in overt Roman or British-style classic conquests and formal annexations. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the victim — the bombed, invaded, dislocated, or segregated — this likely felt a whole lot like empire. And so it was.
Empire and imperialism — except in rare, if cyclical, periods — are terms that were generally anathema to most Americans. After all, the nation’s very origin myth postulates a people who fled to the nascent colonies to escape the ostensible imperium of England’s Anglican Church, in a quest for religious freedom. The U.S. founding fantasy, a century and a half later, posits that these people’s progeny declared independence and formed a republic in a rebellion against the premier empire of the day. It was presumably unthinkable — then and even now — that the resultant republic could itself possess patently imperial proclivities.
Still, for all the later protestation, both famous and average Americans used the term “empire” with surprising regularity. Of course, as with Thomas Jefferson’s descriptive label — “empire of liberty” — the empire-usage was usually caveated or conceptually reframed. In practice, however, much about the American variant of imperialism was decidedly similar to the past models so vehemently and publicly rejected.
In fact, empire has always been one defining aspect of the American experiment. Only hardly anyone knows, or has even heard of, any of this. Yet it is a backstory that needs telling — and broad reading — if Americans hope to understand their present.
There are, obviously, countless comprehensive surveys of American History. Many are quite excellent. Unfortunately, some of the best are essentially unknown. Perhaps that is because academic historians increasingly write, seemingly, only for each other’s edification and rarely reach a broad public audience. Furthermore, due to the caution inherent in their professional historical craft — for understandable reasons — most are loathe to bow to the popular reader’s desire for “relevancy.” In other words, fearful of twisting the past through their own politics or the prism of the present, they often eschew the concept entirely or hedge so repeatedly that the attempt is ultimately sabotaged. Either way, readership suffers.
In the aggregate, the academic historians’ rejection of simplicity, forced connections, and cherry-picked “lessons” for the present is precisely what is attractive about the discipline. The preference for inductive rather than the far more common — especially elsewhere within academia — deductive reasoning, must be judged a net positive. Nonetheless, as poll after poll demonstrates that year after year Americans’ basic historical knowledge reaches newly obscene lows, it seems vital to get these folks reading. This takes on increasing urgency when one observes how even senior — allegedly highly educated — policymakers direct foreign and domestic affairs in the absence of even the most cursory knowledge of relevant historical context. Frankly, it is embarrassing to watch, and often tragic in its human consequences.
Still, like or not, historians will need to meet a busy and time-constrained public halfway if readership — and presumably knowledge — is to meaningfully increase.
I was first struck by the severity of this problem when I returned to teach freshman (“plebe”) American History at the United States Military Academy, West Point. Straight out of graduate school, and a tour in the Afghanistan War just before that, my assessment of the level of historical acuity of the cadets was no doubt informed by both experiences. To simplify, my sense of the decisive importance of the subject was heightened by my own hopeless efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting in wars begun and waged seemingly without the faintest sense of the region’s history. That the cadets would likely, almost inevitably, form the increasingly militarized vanguard of future U.S. foreign policy only added urgency.
Additionally, two years immersed in both the classic and cutting-edge scholarship on U.S. history quite certainly colored my analysis of the students. The cadets at West Point are so highly lauded, and fawningly adulated, that their presumed elite academic qualifications have often been exaggerated. (The actual grade and standardized test data backs this up.) Nevertheless, mine were generally talented students with successful academic records. Yet even within this above average subset — who tended, unsurprisingly, to attend the better high schools — few had anything close to a sophisticated understanding of their own national history.
Early on, I identified a disturbing gap between the widely accepted (though not uncontested) analyses of a half-century’s worth of academic historians, and what many high school history teachers were actually teaching. Though there were interesting regional, gender, and racial variances in this phenomenon, the overall trend held: most cadets entered West Point having been taught — and thus understanding — a rather flimsy brand of U.S. history.
These otherwise gifted students’ understanding of the American past lacked substance or depth, and still pivoted on patriotic platitudes. Such young men and women hardly knew the history of the country they had volunteered to kill and die for. That, I thought to myself in 2014, is how military fiascos are made.
This, of course, was a profound simplification of the complex processes that lead to war or any other public policy. Nevertheless, throughout my teaching tenure I set myself the task of bridging — in some modest way — the gap between what scholars know and students learn. I sought to at least adequately infuse nuanced analyses ubiquitous among academics into the impossible task of teaching the nation’s checkered, if often inspiring, past within a single semester.
That process and its challenges motivated me to write the American History For Truthdiggers series (forthcoming in book form in 2021), an enthusiastic attempt to bridge the perhaps unbridgeable gap between academic and popular history. No doubt the project will be found wanting, but there’s inherent value in the quest, in the very struggle. The skeletal beginnings of this project were the 40 lesson plans I crafted and taught at West Point to future leaders of an army perennially at war.
That the often censorious — some will say downright un-American — analyses of that series and this essay, were introduced to presumably patriotic and conservative West Point cadets may seem shocking. That many other history instructors on the faculty presented not altogether dissimilar concepts may be more surprising still. Nonetheless, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned after finally turning against the Vietnam War: one should not confuse dissent with disloyalty. Unfortunately, in today’s politically and culturally tribal times, this seems the reflexive response to dissidence.
Still, I make no apologies for having presented combat-bound cadets with undeniable dark facts and critical conclusions common among esteemed scholars. Exposure to the historical myths and flaws — in addition to the well-worn triumphs — of the country they might very well die for seemed appropriate. Anything less would have felt obscene. Currently, many of my former students serve in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other combat zones; to date, none have mutinied or deserted. If they could handle the truth, so can all Americans this Fourth of July.
Many of the causes and solutions to the brutality and turmoil of this moment actually lay in the past, in the historical development of U.S. politics and society. Specifically, these aspects of the darkly exceptionalist present can only be understood through a better understanding of four ghastly themes underpinning American history: indigenous genocide, racialized slavery, hyper-capitalism, and militarist imperialism. None of these are strictly past; the legacy and habits of each echo through the years in acute and tangible ways.
White European settlement came at the expense of Native American dispossession, removal, and mass — near extinction-level — death. Contrary to popular conscience-soothing assertions, none of this was inevitable or simply the unavoidable consequence of a lack of indigenous disease immunity. Nor is modern racism simply a slowly dissipating outgrowth of long-passed slavery; it was largely a social construction to justify black exploitation and discipline free white laborers. In fact, long before American independence, racialized chattel slavery significantly delineated the limits of freedom for even free citizens. The habit of enslavement less ended than repeatedly morphed and adapted to the changing times and informed a still pervasive racialized social hierarchy.
Unfettered and minimally regulated private corporate power has been a core characteristic of the U.S. since before the term “capitalism” was even widely used. Though big business, or Wall Street, never constituted a monolithic centralized conspiracy, throughout most of America’s history the profit motive held special place in the pantheon. This reality was less unique than was the widespread, often cross-class, worship of the free market as something inherently American.
Finally, as discussed, empire-building has always been the path of this vocally republican nation. Like racism and slavery, empire evolved rather than ended. The early continental model conquered and subjugated Indians and Mexicans, while later a relatively brief formal maritime foray snatched up Pacific and Caribbean Islands. Lastly, its less formal blend of “soft” (economic and cultural) and “hard” (military threat and action) power allowed for an historically dominant global hegemony by the wind-down of the Cold War — and continue to be aggressively deployed through the present.
For the past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are, help determine public policy, and even that which we imagine possible. President Donald Trump promised to “Make America great again.” That this vague slogan and sentiment so appealed to tens of millions of citizens was itself instructive, and occasions us to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of U.S. history, and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great?” And what made it so?
If definitive answers to these questions aren’t readily available this Fourth of July, at the very least Americans should perhaps ponder what makes us ask them in the first place. That we still don’t is itself exceptional, and diagnosable…
Fourth of July Musings: The Curse of Exceptionalism and the Perils of Patriotism
Our messianic belief that we are the chosen nation has been disastrous for so many here and abroad.
Once again, this Fourth of July, Americans will celebrate — to the unwitting militarist racist tune that is the “Star Spangled Banner” — more than just the nation’s Independence Day. Though most folks will, if at a reasonable social distance, focus more on the backyard beer and brats, U.S. jingoism and exceptionalism will invariably be on the menu.
That last sentiment, particularly amidst the COVID- and mass protest-exposing era of forever war at home and abroad, deserves a closer and critical look. For exceptionalism is truly a national disease that ravages American bodies and democratic institutions alike. This malignancy must be named and shamed in pursuit of precisely the “participatory patriotism” the holiday purports to celebrate. As the (late) man said, “Always look to the language;” so let us begin there:
A shining “City upon a Hill;” possessed with the power to “begin the world over again;” imbued with a “Manifest Destiny;” destined to “make the world safe for democracy;” representing, ultimately, a singularly “indispensable nation.” These are the self-styled musings from a country with a near-clinical collective Messiah complex. So diagnosed, the United States, predictably, would never countenance competition from any another power claiming even a fraction of similar self-righteousness. Indeed, in the past, the U.S. has gone to war — hot or cold — with others who dared.
It is now finally fashionable to utter the relevant sobriquet for America’s historical metaphysics and its consequent behavior: exceptionalism. Taking these quoted descriptors briefly in turn, what is striking is the wide temporal span of the grandiose pronouncements, and the otherwise heterogeneity of the vocalizers.
In sequence, beginning 145 years before the U.S. republic was even founded, for the sources of these quotes we have a Puritan religious zealot (John Winthrop, 1630); followed by an outspoken atheist of decidedly radical and professional revolutionary bent (Thomas Paine, 1776); then a Democratic Party hack of a newspaper columnist (John O’Sullivan, 1839); next the first Republican president who — supposedly single-handedly — freed four million African-American slaves (Abraham Lincoln, 1862); proceeded by an ostensibly progressive internationalist president who also happened to carry the profound racism of his Virginia roots (Woodrow Wilson, 1917); and finally, the last phrase was — and is — thrown around by a range of academics, pundits, and political leaders in the years since World War II ended in 1945. The latter announcers include the nation’s first female secretary of state, Madeline Albright, a purported liberal who also defended (“worth it“) U.S.-conceived UN sanctions on Iraq even if they may have killed hundreds of thousands of children as collateral damage.
Thus, American exceptionalism — which approaches messianism — has always been a demonstrably bipartisan and diffuse enterprise. However, exceptionalist national entities typically, perhaps necessarily, exhibit behaviors characterized by universalism, triumphalism and chauvinism. A nation such as the U.S., conceived and founded upon assumptions of its anointed status as model and mission — as much as tangible state — slid seamlessly into assertions of the global-universalist applicability of its values and political systems.
That those same vague and oft-divisive values were always contested at home rarely gave government or populace much pause or tempered the desire to export them abroad. The results were decidedly mixed, and, in countless cases tragic for the recipients of American political, economic, and cultural largesse.
When the United States met with undeniably profound successes, due to the combination of inherent geographical and natural resource blessings, a prolific populace, and perennially divided hemispheric challengers — leading to what historian C. Vann Woodward dubbed a long “era of free security” — its response tilted towards triumphalism. America’s status as uniquely chosen — whether attributable to divine will or its secularly sacralized inerrant constitution — was thereby reinforced and vindicated.
From this remarkable place of self-righteous confidence, it was never a long way to policy chauvinism. Those intransigents less willing to bend to America’s inspired universalist mission — whether domestic dissidents or equally nationalist foreigners — were characterized as either unenlightened or downright evil, or both. Whatever the framing, these people were ripe for conversion — by the sword if necessary.
Such universalist, triumphalist, and chauvinist outgrowths of American exceptionalism were almost never formulated in these precise terms, and normally rather paternalistically couched as humanitarian and necessary for the collective-good. The language, justifications, and eventually apologia was typically of the “[white] father knows best” variety. Nonetheless, in practice, the results were all too often counted in millions of deaths at home and abroad, and the sentencing of exponentially more lives to second-class status.
No doubt, for a more privileged strata — which undeniably expanded, if haltingly, through the centuries — the development and decisions of the United States offered unprecedented freedoms and material affluence. Nor, it must be said, was America the lone nefarious actor on the world historical scene. Yet, as a consequence of its increasingly remarkable, and ultimately singular power — as well as its persistently benevolent justifications — here there was something uniquely American to speak of.
At root, my forthcoming book — and postwar life’s work — is about that dark side of American exceptionalism. It recounts four centuries worth of a collective — and distinctly human — dissonance on a typically immense American scale. Therefore, in a real sense, this is a history of a self-conscious republic that from its onset walked and talked a whole lot like something far less noble or democratic.
The sordid side of exceptionalism manifested both at home and abroad. National and international “others” were repeatedly and persistently relegated to political and cultural colonies of both internal and external varieties. This need not — though it often did — present in overt Roman or British-style classic conquests and formal annexations. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the victim — the bombed, invaded, dislocated, or segregated — this likely felt a whole lot like empire. And so it was.
Empire and imperialism — except in rare, if cyclical, periods — are terms that were generally anathema to most Americans. After all, the nation’s very origin myth postulates a people who fled to the nascent colonies to escape the ostensible imperium of England’s Anglican Church, in a quest for religious freedom. The U.S. founding fantasy, a century and a half later, posits that these people’s progeny declared independence and formed a republic in a rebellion against the premier empire of the day. It was presumably unthinkable — then and even now — that the resultant republic could itself possess patently imperial proclivities.
Still, for all the later protestation, both famous and average Americans used the term “empire” with surprising regularity. Of course, as with Thomas Jefferson’s descriptive label — “empire of liberty” — the empire-usage was usually caveated or conceptually reframed. In practice, however, much about the American variant of imperialism was decidedly similar to the past models so vehemently and publicly rejected.
In fact, empire has always been one defining aspect of the American experiment. Only hardly anyone knows, or has even heard of, any of this. Yet it is a backstory that needs telling — and broad reading — if Americans hope to understand their present.
There are, obviously, countless comprehensive surveys of American History. Many are quite excellent. Unfortunately, some of the best are essentially unknown. Perhaps that is because academic historians increasingly write, seemingly, only for each other’s edification and rarely reach a broad public audience. Furthermore, due to the caution inherent in their professional historical craft — for understandable reasons — most are loathe to bow to the popular reader’s desire for “relevancy.” In other words, fearful of twisting the past through their own politics or the prism of the present, they often eschew the concept entirely or hedge so repeatedly that the attempt is ultimately sabotaged. Either way, readership suffers.
In the aggregate, the academic historians’ rejection of simplicity, forced connections, and cherry-picked “lessons” for the present is precisely what is attractive about the discipline. The preference for inductive rather than the far more common — especially elsewhere within academia — deductive reasoning, must be judged a net positive. Nonetheless, as poll after poll demonstrates that year after year Americans’ basic historical knowledge reaches newly obscene lows, it seems vital to get these folks reading. This takes on increasing urgency when one observes how even senior — allegedly highly educated — policymakers direct foreign and domestic affairs in the absence of even the most cursory knowledge of relevant historical context. Frankly, it is embarrassing to watch, and often tragic in its human consequences.
Still, like or not, historians will need to meet a busy and time-constrained public halfway if readership — and presumably knowledge — is to meaningfully increase.
I was first struck by the severity of this problem when I returned to teach freshman (“plebe”) American History at the United States Military Academy, West Point. Straight out of graduate school, and a tour in the Afghanistan War just before that, my assessment of the level of historical acuity of the cadets was no doubt informed by both experiences. To simplify, my sense of the decisive importance of the subject was heightened by my own hopeless efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting in wars begun and waged seemingly without the faintest sense of the region’s history. That the cadets would likely, almost inevitably, form the increasingly militarized vanguard of future U.S. foreign policy only added urgency.
Additionally, two years immersed in both the classic and cutting-edge scholarship on U.S. history quite certainly colored my analysis of the students. The cadets at West Point are so highly lauded, and fawningly adulated, that their presumed elite academic qualifications have often been exaggerated. (The actual grade and standardized test data backs this up.) Nevertheless, mine were generally talented students with successful academic records. Yet even within this above average subset — who tended, unsurprisingly, to attend the better high schools — few had anything close to a sophisticated understanding of their own national history.
Early on, I identified a disturbing gap between the widely accepted (though not uncontested) analyses of a half-century’s worth of academic historians, and what many high school history teachers were actually teaching. Though there were interesting regional, gender, and racial variances in this phenomenon, the overall trend held: most cadets entered West Point having been taught — and thus understanding — a rather flimsy brand of U.S. history.
These otherwise gifted students’ understanding of the American past lacked substance or depth, and still pivoted on patriotic platitudes. Such young men and women hardly knew the history of the country they had volunteered to kill and die for. That, I thought to myself in 2014, is how military fiascos are made.
This, of course, was a profound simplification of the complex processes that lead to war or any other public policy. Nevertheless, throughout my teaching tenure I set myself the task of bridging — in some modest way — the gap between what scholars know and students learn. I sought to at least adequately infuse nuanced analyses ubiquitous among academics into the impossible task of teaching the nation’s checkered, if often inspiring, past within a single semester.
That process and its challenges motivated me to write the American History For Truthdiggers series (forthcoming in book form in 2021), an enthusiastic attempt to bridge the perhaps unbridgeable gap between academic and popular history. No doubt the project will be found wanting, but there’s inherent value in the quest, in the very struggle. The skeletal beginnings of this project were the 40 lesson plans I crafted and taught at West Point to future leaders of an army perennially at war.
That the often censorious — some will say downright un-American — analyses of that series and this essay, were introduced to presumably patriotic and conservative West Point cadets may seem shocking. That many other history instructors on the faculty presented not altogether dissimilar concepts may be more surprising still. Nonetheless, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned after finally turning against the Vietnam War: one should not confuse dissent with disloyalty. Unfortunately, in today’s politically and culturally tribal times, this seems the reflexive response to dissidence.
Still, I make no apologies for having presented combat-bound cadets with undeniable dark facts and critical conclusions common among esteemed scholars. Exposure to the historical myths and flaws — in addition to the well-worn triumphs — of the country they might very well die for seemed appropriate. Anything less would have felt obscene. Currently, many of my former students serve in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other combat zones; to date, none have mutinied or deserted. If they could handle the truth, so can all Americans this Fourth of July.
Many of the causes and solutions to the brutality and turmoil of this moment actually lay in the past, in the historical development of U.S. politics and society. Specifically, these aspects of the darkly exceptionalist present can only be understood through a better understanding of four ghastly themes underpinning American history: indigenous genocide, racialized slavery, hyper-capitalism, and militarist imperialism. None of these are strictly past; the legacy and habits of each echo through the years in acute and tangible ways.
White European settlement came at the expense of Native American dispossession, removal, and mass — near extinction-level — death. Contrary to popular conscience-soothing assertions, none of this was inevitable or simply the unavoidable consequence of a lack of indigenous disease immunity. Nor is modern racism simply a slowly dissipating outgrowth of long-passed slavery; it was largely a social construction to justify black exploitation and discipline free white laborers. In fact, long before American independence, racialized chattel slavery significantly delineated the limits of freedom for even free citizens. The habit of enslavement less ended than repeatedly morphed and adapted to the changing times and informed a still pervasive racialized social hierarchy.
Unfettered and minimally regulated private corporate power has been a core characteristic of the U.S. since before the term “capitalism” was even widely used. Though big business, or Wall Street, never constituted a monolithic centralized conspiracy, throughout most of America’s history the profit motive held special place in the pantheon. This reality was less unique than was the widespread, often cross-class, worship of the free market as something inherently American.
Finally, as discussed, empire-building has always been the path of this vocally republican nation. Like racism and slavery, empire evolved rather than ended. The early continental model conquered and subjugated Indians and Mexicans, while later a relatively brief formal maritime foray snatched up Pacific and Caribbean Islands. Lastly, its less formal blend of “soft” (economic and cultural) and “hard” (military threat and action) power allowed for an historically dominant global hegemony by the wind-down of the Cold War — and continue to be aggressively deployed through the present.
For the past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are, help determine public policy, and even that which we imagine possible. President Donald Trump promised to “Make America great again.” That this vague slogan and sentiment so appealed to tens of millions of citizens was itself instructive, and occasions us to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of U.S. history, and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great?” And what made it so?
If definitive answers to these questions aren’t readily available this Fourth of July, at the very least Americans should perhaps ponder what makes us ask them in the first place. That we still don’t is itself exceptional, and diagnosable…
Saturday, July 4, 2020
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https://scheerpost.com/2020/06/02/the-treason-of-the-ruling-class/
The Treason of the Ruling Class
The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a “public thing” or the “property of a people,” has been transformed into an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to commit financial fraud and theft.
The loss of control over our system of rulership, the misuse of all democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money upwards into to a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power, ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to have a monopoly on violence. Violence employed by police and security agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces, to protect the exclusive interests of a tiny, ruling criminal class exposes the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling elites.
“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience,” Stokely Carmichael warned. And if your opponent is bereft of a conscience, then state violence is inevitably met with counter-violence. Tyranny takes the place of reform. The danger of widespread sectarian violence in America is now very real.
There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American body politic, is impossible; revolution; or tyranny. The more things deteriorate, the more the elites feel threatened, the more brutal the police, the National Guard and the organs of state security will become. The longer the serfs defy their masters the more the populations in the jails and prisons, which are already the largest in the world, will swell.
If the mafia state is not overthrown, then America will become a naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be met with draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country have already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray. The huge social divides, largely built around race, will be used by the neo-fascists in power to divert a legitimate rage by a betrayed working class to set neighbor against neighbor. Neo-fascist “patriots” will be unleashed like attack dogs against people of color, Muslims, feminists, intellectuals, artists, the media and liberals. Dissent, even nonviolent dissent, will become treason.
The uprisings in the streets of American cities are not only about the wanton murder by police of yet another person of color, but a frantic fight to wrest back power over our own lives. They go far beyond police brutality, a daily reality for those trapped in our internal colonies where 1,100 citizens are murdered by police every year, almost all unarmed. The uprisings are fueled as well by the seizure of the institutional and structural mechanisms that once made some form of equality, always imperfect and always colored by an animus towards the poor and people of color, possible.
Half the country lives in poverty or a category called near poverty. The working class and the working poor are priced out of the health care system. The schools do not educate their children, who live without adequate food and often clean water, are repeatedly evicted from their homes, have their utilities shut off, cannot find jobs, are crippled by punishing debt peonage and with the pandemic are dying at disproportionally higher rates. They get the message the oligarchs are sending. They, and their children, are expendable. They don’t count. Their lives are of no consequence, unless they are locked in a cage where their bodies can generate as much as $60,000 a year for the multitude of corporations, including the for-profit medical services, food services, money transfer services, commissary services, phone services, private prisons and prison contractors, not to mention the large corporations and state governments that exploit the cheap and bonded labor of 1 million of our 2.3 million prisoners.
The prison system is a multi-billion dollar a year industry with lobbyists in state capitals and Washington making sure these bodies remain in cages or are put back into cages soon after they are released. The neo-slavery in our prisons is the corporate model envisioned for all of America.
The two ruling parties are equally complicit in this assault. The Democratic Party, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, is trying to sell us a presidential nominee, Joe Biden, who was one of the principal architects of de-industrialization and responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of good, union jobs. Biden and Bill Clinton also destroyed our welfare program, where 70 percent of the recipients were children, and orchestrated the doubling of our prison population and the tripling and quadrupling of sentences.
Biden, as Naomi Murakawa points out in “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” was a driving force behind the notoriously harsh penalties in the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, and the three-strikes legislation in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which also provided funding for 100,000 new police officers and the aggressive prosecution of 60 new capital crimes. He sponsored legislation to dramatically curtail the ability of those in prison to appeal and led the passage of the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 and The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. He oversaw the militarization of the police and the massive expansion of death-eligible crimes, which he has repeatedly bragged about.
Biden was also at the forefront of the re-segregation of our public school system and has repeatedly called for cuts to Social Security. He was instrumental in the disastrous trade deals such as the North American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and austerity programs as well as establishing the most pervasive system of mass government surveillance in human history. Watching Stacey Abrams, who certainly knows better, twist herself into contortions to lavish praise on Biden, even tossing the #MeToo movement overboard, is another sad example of the corrosive disease of careerism. Biden, one of the most important architects behind the wars in the Middle East, where we have squandered upwards of $7 trillion and destroyed or extinguished the lives of millions of people, is personally responsible for far more suffering and death at home and abroad than Donald Trump.
If we had a functioning judicial and legislative system, Biden, along with the other architects of our disastrous imperial wars, plundering of the country and betrayal of the American working class, would be put on trial, not offered up as a solution to our political and economic debacle. The myopia of the ruling elites is that they think they can foist Biden on us because he is not Trump. But the game is up. The façade of democracy no longer works.
It is only the dwindling and largely white middle and professional classes who still believe the fiction that this election offers a choice or that we live in a democracy. The working class and the working poor know better. Their lives were, as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, one long emergency before the pandemic. Now they face the prospect of bankruptcy this summer when unemployment and stimulus checks run out, the moratorium is lifted on evictions to double or triple the unhoused population of 11 million people and unemployment skyrockets to 25 percent. Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for sick pay, and some 43 million Americans have just lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. Food banks are already overrun with tens of thousands of desperate families.
And in the midst of this crisis, what did our kleptocratic rulers do? They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves at our expense, while tossing crumbs out of the windows of their private jets, yachts and palatial homes to the suffering and despised masses.
The CARES Act handed trillions in funds or tax breaks to oil companies, the airline industry, which alone got $50 billion in stimulus money, the cruise ship industry, a $170 billion windfall for the real estate industry, private equity firms, lobbying groups, whose political action committees have given $191 million in campaign contributions to politicians in the last two decades, the meat industry and corporations that have moved offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. The act allowed the largest corporations to gobble up money that was supposed to go to keep small businesses solvent to pay workers. It gave 80 percent of tax breaks under the stimulus package to millionaires and allowed the wealthiest to get stimulus checks that average $1.7 million. The CARES Act also authorized $454 billion for the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a massive slush fund doled out by Trump cronies to corporations that, when leveraged 10 to 1, can be used to create a staggering $4.5 trillion in assets. The act authorized the Fed to give $1.5 trillion in loans to Wall Street, which no one expects will ever be paid back. American billionaires have gotten $434 billion richer since the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added $34.6 billion to his personal wealth since the pandemic started.
How long can you expect people to watch their children go hungry? How long can you expect people to watch their loved ones suffer and die because they can’t get medical care? How long can you expect people to be abused by lawless police and a court system designed to railroad the poor into jails and prisons? How long can you watch the rich profit from your misery?
I would prefer that our revolution eschew the poison of violence, which I know too intimately from my two decades as a war correspondent. But I also know that when everything around you conspires to crush you, the only way left to affirm yourself is to destroy, not only the structures and institutions that have oppressed you, but often yourself. I saw this when I lived in the impoverished neighborhood of Roxbury in Boston and when I worked as a reporter in Gaza. This understanding was something Malcom X, who came out of poverty, always understood and Martin Luther King, a product of the black bourgeoisie, learned later.
It is ultimately the ruling elites who will determine the mechanics of resistance. When they close every escape route, when they speak exclusively in the language of force, then the language of force becomes the only form of communication. Trump’s demand that states use the National Guard to crush the protests and threat to deploy the U.S. military in the streets of American cities only heightens the anger and frustration that led to the uprisings.
The ruling elites are, at the same time, desperately seeking scapegoats. The idea that antifa, which on the spectrum of terrorist groups would rank alongside the Boy Scouts, is behind these clashes is as ridiculous as the idea that Russia is responsible for the election of Trump. This desperate search for explanations that absolve the ruling elites saw Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national-security adviser, blame the violence on “foreign actors,” adding that “this is right out of the Russian playbook.” This trope is always trotted by despotic rulers to discredit dissidents who are branded as the enemy of the people.
The longer the ruling elites refuse to address the root causes behind these protests, the more they loot the treasury to enrich themselves and their fellow oligarchs, the more they engage in futile and absurd efforts to deflect blame, the more unrest will spread. The last desperate resort by the oligarchs to save themselves will be to stoke the fires of racialized violence between disenfranchised whites and disenfranchised people of color. This, I fear, is the next chapter in this saga. I saw this tactic used to deadly effect in the former Yugoslavia. These are dark times. They are about to get darker.
The Treason of the Ruling Class
The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a “public thing” or the “property of a people,” has been transformed into an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to commit financial fraud and theft.
The loss of control over our system of rulership, the misuse of all democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money upwards into to a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power, ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to have a monopoly on violence. Violence employed by police and security agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces, to protect the exclusive interests of a tiny, ruling criminal class exposes the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling elites.
“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience,” Stokely Carmichael warned. And if your opponent is bereft of a conscience, then state violence is inevitably met with counter-violence. Tyranny takes the place of reform. The danger of widespread sectarian violence in America is now very real.
There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American body politic, is impossible; revolution; or tyranny. The more things deteriorate, the more the elites feel threatened, the more brutal the police, the National Guard and the organs of state security will become. The longer the serfs defy their masters the more the populations in the jails and prisons, which are already the largest in the world, will swell.
If the mafia state is not overthrown, then America will become a naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be met with draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country have already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray. The huge social divides, largely built around race, will be used by the neo-fascists in power to divert a legitimate rage by a betrayed working class to set neighbor against neighbor. Neo-fascist “patriots” will be unleashed like attack dogs against people of color, Muslims, feminists, intellectuals, artists, the media and liberals. Dissent, even nonviolent dissent, will become treason.
The uprisings in the streets of American cities are not only about the wanton murder by police of yet another person of color, but a frantic fight to wrest back power over our own lives. They go far beyond police brutality, a daily reality for those trapped in our internal colonies where 1,100 citizens are murdered by police every year, almost all unarmed. The uprisings are fueled as well by the seizure of the institutional and structural mechanisms that once made some form of equality, always imperfect and always colored by an animus towards the poor and people of color, possible.
Half the country lives in poverty or a category called near poverty. The working class and the working poor are priced out of the health care system. The schools do not educate their children, who live without adequate food and often clean water, are repeatedly evicted from their homes, have their utilities shut off, cannot find jobs, are crippled by punishing debt peonage and with the pandemic are dying at disproportionally higher rates. They get the message the oligarchs are sending. They, and their children, are expendable. They don’t count. Their lives are of no consequence, unless they are locked in a cage where their bodies can generate as much as $60,000 a year for the multitude of corporations, including the for-profit medical services, food services, money transfer services, commissary services, phone services, private prisons and prison contractors, not to mention the large corporations and state governments that exploit the cheap and bonded labor of 1 million of our 2.3 million prisoners.
The prison system is a multi-billion dollar a year industry with lobbyists in state capitals and Washington making sure these bodies remain in cages or are put back into cages soon after they are released. The neo-slavery in our prisons is the corporate model envisioned for all of America.
The two ruling parties are equally complicit in this assault. The Democratic Party, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, is trying to sell us a presidential nominee, Joe Biden, who was one of the principal architects of de-industrialization and responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of good, union jobs. Biden and Bill Clinton also destroyed our welfare program, where 70 percent of the recipients were children, and orchestrated the doubling of our prison population and the tripling and quadrupling of sentences.
Biden, as Naomi Murakawa points out in “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” was a driving force behind the notoriously harsh penalties in the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, and the three-strikes legislation in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which also provided funding for 100,000 new police officers and the aggressive prosecution of 60 new capital crimes. He sponsored legislation to dramatically curtail the ability of those in prison to appeal and led the passage of the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 and The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. He oversaw the militarization of the police and the massive expansion of death-eligible crimes, which he has repeatedly bragged about.
Biden was also at the forefront of the re-segregation of our public school system and has repeatedly called for cuts to Social Security. He was instrumental in the disastrous trade deals such as the North American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and austerity programs as well as establishing the most pervasive system of mass government surveillance in human history. Watching Stacey Abrams, who certainly knows better, twist herself into contortions to lavish praise on Biden, even tossing the #MeToo movement overboard, is another sad example of the corrosive disease of careerism. Biden, one of the most important architects behind the wars in the Middle East, where we have squandered upwards of $7 trillion and destroyed or extinguished the lives of millions of people, is personally responsible for far more suffering and death at home and abroad than Donald Trump.
If we had a functioning judicial and legislative system, Biden, along with the other architects of our disastrous imperial wars, plundering of the country and betrayal of the American working class, would be put on trial, not offered up as a solution to our political and economic debacle. The myopia of the ruling elites is that they think they can foist Biden on us because he is not Trump. But the game is up. The façade of democracy no longer works.
It is only the dwindling and largely white middle and professional classes who still believe the fiction that this election offers a choice or that we live in a democracy. The working class and the working poor know better. Their lives were, as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, one long emergency before the pandemic. Now they face the prospect of bankruptcy this summer when unemployment and stimulus checks run out, the moratorium is lifted on evictions to double or triple the unhoused population of 11 million people and unemployment skyrockets to 25 percent. Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for sick pay, and some 43 million Americans have just lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. Food banks are already overrun with tens of thousands of desperate families.
And in the midst of this crisis, what did our kleptocratic rulers do? They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves at our expense, while tossing crumbs out of the windows of their private jets, yachts and palatial homes to the suffering and despised masses.
The CARES Act handed trillions in funds or tax breaks to oil companies, the airline industry, which alone got $50 billion in stimulus money, the cruise ship industry, a $170 billion windfall for the real estate industry, private equity firms, lobbying groups, whose political action committees have given $191 million in campaign contributions to politicians in the last two decades, the meat industry and corporations that have moved offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. The act allowed the largest corporations to gobble up money that was supposed to go to keep small businesses solvent to pay workers. It gave 80 percent of tax breaks under the stimulus package to millionaires and allowed the wealthiest to get stimulus checks that average $1.7 million. The CARES Act also authorized $454 billion for the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a massive slush fund doled out by Trump cronies to corporations that, when leveraged 10 to 1, can be used to create a staggering $4.5 trillion in assets. The act authorized the Fed to give $1.5 trillion in loans to Wall Street, which no one expects will ever be paid back. American billionaires have gotten $434 billion richer since the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added $34.6 billion to his personal wealth since the pandemic started.
How long can you expect people to watch their children go hungry? How long can you expect people to watch their loved ones suffer and die because they can’t get medical care? How long can you expect people to be abused by lawless police and a court system designed to railroad the poor into jails and prisons? How long can you watch the rich profit from your misery?
I would prefer that our revolution eschew the poison of violence, which I know too intimately from my two decades as a war correspondent. But I also know that when everything around you conspires to crush you, the only way left to affirm yourself is to destroy, not only the structures and institutions that have oppressed you, but often yourself. I saw this when I lived in the impoverished neighborhood of Roxbury in Boston and when I worked as a reporter in Gaza. This understanding was something Malcom X, who came out of poverty, always understood and Martin Luther King, a product of the black bourgeoisie, learned later.
It is ultimately the ruling elites who will determine the mechanics of resistance. When they close every escape route, when they speak exclusively in the language of force, then the language of force becomes the only form of communication. Trump’s demand that states use the National Guard to crush the protests and threat to deploy the U.S. military in the streets of American cities only heightens the anger and frustration that led to the uprisings.
The ruling elites are, at the same time, desperately seeking scapegoats. The idea that antifa, which on the spectrum of terrorist groups would rank alongside the Boy Scouts, is behind these clashes is as ridiculous as the idea that Russia is responsible for the election of Trump. This desperate search for explanations that absolve the ruling elites saw Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national-security adviser, blame the violence on “foreign actors,” adding that “this is right out of the Russian playbook.” This trope is always trotted by despotic rulers to discredit dissidents who are branded as the enemy of the people.
The longer the ruling elites refuse to address the root causes behind these protests, the more they loot the treasury to enrich themselves and their fellow oligarchs, the more they engage in futile and absurd efforts to deflect blame, the more unrest will spread. The last desperate resort by the oligarchs to save themselves will be to stoke the fires of racialized violence between disenfranchised whites and disenfranchised people of color. This, I fear, is the next chapter in this saga. I saw this tactic used to deadly effect in the former Yugoslavia. These are dark times. They are about to get darker.
Friday, July 3, 2020
SC214-11
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly20/global-precipice7-20.html
How We Got Here: the Global Economy's 75-Year Stumble to the Precipice
How did the global economy end up teetering on a precarious financial precipice? To formulate a cogent answer, let's take a whirlwind tour of the history of the global economy 1946-2020.
Before we start the tour, I want to return briefly to my first Musings of the year, which was posted on January 4, 2020, before Covid-19 was officially announced on January 23, 2020. (The Musings Reports are sent weekly to patrons and subscribers at the $5/month or higher level.)
Instability Rising: Why 2020 Will Be Different:
"Economically, the 11 years since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 have been one relatively coherent era of modest growth, rising wealth/income inequality and coordinated central bank stimulus every time a crisis threatened to disrupt the domestic or global economy.
This era will draw to a close in 2020 and a new era of destabilization and uncertainty begins."
The long-term trends set up a row of dominoes that the pandemic has toppled. But any puff of air that toppled the first domino would have toppled all the dominoes of fragility, instability and unsustainable extremes that characterize the global economy.
The whirlwind tour of the global economy's history must include these essential dynamics: energy, currencies, globalization, debt and financialization, which broadly speaking refers to everything that renders finance (borrowing, leverage, speculation) more profitable than actually generating goods and services.
The "glorious thirty" (Les Trente Glorieuses) years from 1946 to 1975 were decades of rising prosperity in the developed world (Europe, Japan, North America) and rapid development in the first tier of developing countries in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. (Decolonized nations and China struggled with political, social and economic turmoil.)
Costs were low for fuel, housing, food, healthcare, education, etc. as rebuilt industrial bases produced lower cost goods and oil/natural gas were cheap. The global currency market was stable as the U.S. dollar was pre-eminent, enabling Japan and Western Europe to sell their goods to America at discounted prices due to the strong dollar. This policy was explicitly designed to strengthen the economies of allies faced with the threat of the Soviet Union's global ambitions.
The "glorious thirty" were also decades of rising wages and affordable, modestly growing credit and low inflation as the money supply expanded more or less in tandem with the expansion of goods and services and credit.
The wheels fell off in the 1970s as the oil-exporting nations muscled energy prices higher to gain a share of the profits, the gold-backed US dollar regime fell to pieces and inflation skyrocketed, generating a previously unknown economic malaise known as stagflation: high inflation plus stagnant growth.
At this same juncture, the external costs of industrial pollution finally came due, and global competition from lower-cost nations (helped by currencies that traded at deep discounts to the US dollar) crushed inefficient industries in the U.S. and Europe.
The 1980s saw a resurgence of growth, but with a different mix of sources. Demographically, the global postwar Baby Boom generation entered their highest productivity and spending years, boosting global demand, the supermassive new oil fields discovered in the early 1970s finally came online (Alaska, North Sea, West Africa), dramatically lowered the price of oil while soaring interest rates crushed inflation and wrung bad debt out of the developed economies, Developing nations that had struggled in the 1970s finally found their footing (India, China, South America, etc.)
The steep investment in reducing pollution began paying off and the first wave of financialization boosted mergers, buyouts and asset prices.
The 1980s was capped by the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, eliminating the costly military rivalry of the Cold War, and the collapse of Japan's massive credit/asset bubble in 1989-90--a warning sign that was ignored as a one-off.
The 1990s continued the trend of global growth, aided by low inflation, cheap energy, expanding globalization and the mass commercialization of the Internet and computing, as technologies that were once expensive and difficult to use became affordable and accessible.
The Neoliberal ideology --that the way to solve virtually any problem, from poverty on up, is to turn everything into a global market of freely traded labor, capital, goods and services-- became the default global economic faith, with some variations (a market economy with Chinese characteristics, etc.)
The 1990s was capped by the emergence of China as the manufacturing hub of the global economy, a role that was institutionalized by China's acceptance into the WTO, and the bursting of the Dot-Com bubble in March 2000.
As globalization and financialization became dominant forces (the natural result of Neoliberalism), instabilities appeared in currency markets (the Thai baht / Asian contagion of the late 1990s) and asset markets (the Dot-Com stock market bubble). Japan's recovery from the credit bubble collapse faltered, ushering in 30+ years of stagnation, leading to an overlooked social decay with extraordinary demographic and economic consequences that are still playing out.
As the global economy reeled from these instabilities in 1998-2000, central banks flooded asset markets with newly created currency, the goal being to stave off a recession, which burns off bad debt, marginal investments and companies, reducing credit expansion and consumption.
Rather than accept the risks of a conventional business-cycle recession, central banks pushed financialization to new heights--heights which quickly distorted markets.
As a result, the growth of the 2000s was different: in effect, central banks had created a credit/asset-bubble dependent economy, with growth coming not from lowering costs, improving productivity and rising wages, but from speculations in financialized markets.
This was simply the logical extension of Neoliberalism: if existing markets weren't profitable enough, then create new markets for new exotic financial instruments and lower the cost of borrowing to spur consumption and investment.
The benefits of these financial instruments were asymmetric: those originating these instruments made billions, while the borrowers taking on the subprime mortgages, etc. were accepting risks they didn't understand. This dynamic fueled soaring wealth/income inequality.
Apparently unbeknownst to central bankers, super-low interest rates and abundant liquidity didn't spur investments in increasing productivity, it incentivized highly leveraged speculative bets. This manifested in subprime mortgages funding house-flipping by the masses and the origination of exotic financial instruments such as CDOs and CLOs.
Ultimately, the central banks' no-holds-barred Neoliberalism led to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008-09, as the risks that were supposedly hedged blew up and the markets froze up (i.e. markets became illiquid as buyers vanished).
As former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan admitted, the central banks failed to see that markets are not as self-regulating as the Neoliberal faithful believed: when bubbles pop, buyers vanish and markets go bidless/illiquid: sellers are desperate to sell but there are no buyers at any price.
This was the inevitable end-game of financialized, globalized Neoliberalism, and rather than face that reality, central banks and policy-makers double-downed on the same policies that created the 2008 bubble that was destined to pop with horrific consequences to everyone who had a stake in any of the casino's games.
We now come to the 2010s, in which financialization and globalization essentially conquered the global economy, leading to the brittle fragilities that are now unraveling.
With the cost of living rising and wages stagnating, the "solution" was to borrow $10 to get $1 of growth. Since global markets were saturated with debt and risk, lenders cannibalized domestic markets, loading college students with $2 trillion in student loans and enabling a fracking "miracle" that was less an energy miracle and more a financial miracle as companies that lost billions continued to get cheap loans and sell bonds.
The global economy is now teetering on a precipice in every sector: energy extraction costs have risen, requiring higher prices for oil, but consumers whose wages have stagnated for 20 years can no longer afford higher prices for oil or anything else.
Globalization has optimized profits at the expense of everything else: ecological sustainability, the security of food and energy sources, etc., while financialization has gutted the real economy in an extraction process that concentrates all the gains into the hands of the few at the top of the financialization/globalization pyramid: a winners-take-most economy that has corrupted and distorted the political and social orders.
All the critical dynamics--energy, currencies, globalization, debt and financialization--have reached extremes that made destabilization--i.e. a tumble into collapse--inevitable.
What happens when the naive hope that the brittle, fragile extremes of the global economy could be completely restored to mid-2019 levels dissipates and is replaced by the sober realization there not only will there not be a recovery, but there can't be a recovery, as those brittle extremes have been lost for good?
Since the authorities have no Plan B, uncertainty, risk and volatility could reach extremes few anticipate as Plan A--push extremes to even riskier extremes--generates increasingly consequential unintended consequences.
The unstable, brittle edge of the precipice is giving way, and there is nothing but air below.
How We Got Here: the Global Economy's 75-Year Stumble to the Precipice
How did the global economy end up teetering on a precarious financial precipice? To formulate a cogent answer, let's take a whirlwind tour of the history of the global economy 1946-2020.
Before we start the tour, I want to return briefly to my first Musings of the year, which was posted on January 4, 2020, before Covid-19 was officially announced on January 23, 2020. (The Musings Reports are sent weekly to patrons and subscribers at the $5/month or higher level.)
Instability Rising: Why 2020 Will Be Different:
"Economically, the 11 years since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 have been one relatively coherent era of modest growth, rising wealth/income inequality and coordinated central bank stimulus every time a crisis threatened to disrupt the domestic or global economy.
This era will draw to a close in 2020 and a new era of destabilization and uncertainty begins."
The long-term trends set up a row of dominoes that the pandemic has toppled. But any puff of air that toppled the first domino would have toppled all the dominoes of fragility, instability and unsustainable extremes that characterize the global economy.
The whirlwind tour of the global economy's history must include these essential dynamics: energy, currencies, globalization, debt and financialization, which broadly speaking refers to everything that renders finance (borrowing, leverage, speculation) more profitable than actually generating goods and services.
The "glorious thirty" (Les Trente Glorieuses) years from 1946 to 1975 were decades of rising prosperity in the developed world (Europe, Japan, North America) and rapid development in the first tier of developing countries in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. (Decolonized nations and China struggled with political, social and economic turmoil.)
Costs were low for fuel, housing, food, healthcare, education, etc. as rebuilt industrial bases produced lower cost goods and oil/natural gas were cheap. The global currency market was stable as the U.S. dollar was pre-eminent, enabling Japan and Western Europe to sell their goods to America at discounted prices due to the strong dollar. This policy was explicitly designed to strengthen the economies of allies faced with the threat of the Soviet Union's global ambitions.
The "glorious thirty" were also decades of rising wages and affordable, modestly growing credit and low inflation as the money supply expanded more or less in tandem with the expansion of goods and services and credit.
The wheels fell off in the 1970s as the oil-exporting nations muscled energy prices higher to gain a share of the profits, the gold-backed US dollar regime fell to pieces and inflation skyrocketed, generating a previously unknown economic malaise known as stagflation: high inflation plus stagnant growth.
At this same juncture, the external costs of industrial pollution finally came due, and global competition from lower-cost nations (helped by currencies that traded at deep discounts to the US dollar) crushed inefficient industries in the U.S. and Europe.
The 1980s saw a resurgence of growth, but with a different mix of sources. Demographically, the global postwar Baby Boom generation entered their highest productivity and spending years, boosting global demand, the supermassive new oil fields discovered in the early 1970s finally came online (Alaska, North Sea, West Africa), dramatically lowered the price of oil while soaring interest rates crushed inflation and wrung bad debt out of the developed economies, Developing nations that had struggled in the 1970s finally found their footing (India, China, South America, etc.)
The steep investment in reducing pollution began paying off and the first wave of financialization boosted mergers, buyouts and asset prices.
The 1980s was capped by the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, eliminating the costly military rivalry of the Cold War, and the collapse of Japan's massive credit/asset bubble in 1989-90--a warning sign that was ignored as a one-off.
The 1990s continued the trend of global growth, aided by low inflation, cheap energy, expanding globalization and the mass commercialization of the Internet and computing, as technologies that were once expensive and difficult to use became affordable and accessible.
The Neoliberal ideology --that the way to solve virtually any problem, from poverty on up, is to turn everything into a global market of freely traded labor, capital, goods and services-- became the default global economic faith, with some variations (a market economy with Chinese characteristics, etc.)
The 1990s was capped by the emergence of China as the manufacturing hub of the global economy, a role that was institutionalized by China's acceptance into the WTO, and the bursting of the Dot-Com bubble in March 2000.
As globalization and financialization became dominant forces (the natural result of Neoliberalism), instabilities appeared in currency markets (the Thai baht / Asian contagion of the late 1990s) and asset markets (the Dot-Com stock market bubble). Japan's recovery from the credit bubble collapse faltered, ushering in 30+ years of stagnation, leading to an overlooked social decay with extraordinary demographic and economic consequences that are still playing out.
As the global economy reeled from these instabilities in 1998-2000, central banks flooded asset markets with newly created currency, the goal being to stave off a recession, which burns off bad debt, marginal investments and companies, reducing credit expansion and consumption.
Rather than accept the risks of a conventional business-cycle recession, central banks pushed financialization to new heights--heights which quickly distorted markets.
As a result, the growth of the 2000s was different: in effect, central banks had created a credit/asset-bubble dependent economy, with growth coming not from lowering costs, improving productivity and rising wages, but from speculations in financialized markets.
This was simply the logical extension of Neoliberalism: if existing markets weren't profitable enough, then create new markets for new exotic financial instruments and lower the cost of borrowing to spur consumption and investment.
The benefits of these financial instruments were asymmetric: those originating these instruments made billions, while the borrowers taking on the subprime mortgages, etc. were accepting risks they didn't understand. This dynamic fueled soaring wealth/income inequality.
Apparently unbeknownst to central bankers, super-low interest rates and abundant liquidity didn't spur investments in increasing productivity, it incentivized highly leveraged speculative bets. This manifested in subprime mortgages funding house-flipping by the masses and the origination of exotic financial instruments such as CDOs and CLOs.
Ultimately, the central banks' no-holds-barred Neoliberalism led to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008-09, as the risks that were supposedly hedged blew up and the markets froze up (i.e. markets became illiquid as buyers vanished).
As former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan admitted, the central banks failed to see that markets are not as self-regulating as the Neoliberal faithful believed: when bubbles pop, buyers vanish and markets go bidless/illiquid: sellers are desperate to sell but there are no buyers at any price.
This was the inevitable end-game of financialized, globalized Neoliberalism, and rather than face that reality, central banks and policy-makers double-downed on the same policies that created the 2008 bubble that was destined to pop with horrific consequences to everyone who had a stake in any of the casino's games.
We now come to the 2010s, in which financialization and globalization essentially conquered the global economy, leading to the brittle fragilities that are now unraveling.
With the cost of living rising and wages stagnating, the "solution" was to borrow $10 to get $1 of growth. Since global markets were saturated with debt and risk, lenders cannibalized domestic markets, loading college students with $2 trillion in student loans and enabling a fracking "miracle" that was less an energy miracle and more a financial miracle as companies that lost billions continued to get cheap loans and sell bonds.
The global economy is now teetering on a precipice in every sector: energy extraction costs have risen, requiring higher prices for oil, but consumers whose wages have stagnated for 20 years can no longer afford higher prices for oil or anything else.
Globalization has optimized profits at the expense of everything else: ecological sustainability, the security of food and energy sources, etc., while financialization has gutted the real economy in an extraction process that concentrates all the gains into the hands of the few at the top of the financialization/globalization pyramid: a winners-take-most economy that has corrupted and distorted the political and social orders.
All the critical dynamics--energy, currencies, globalization, debt and financialization--have reached extremes that made destabilization--i.e. a tumble into collapse--inevitable.
What happens when the naive hope that the brittle, fragile extremes of the global economy could be completely restored to mid-2019 levels dissipates and is replaced by the sober realization there not only will there not be a recovery, but there can't be a recovery, as those brittle extremes have been lost for good?
Since the authorities have no Plan B, uncertainty, risk and volatility could reach extremes few anticipate as Plan A--push extremes to even riskier extremes--generates increasingly consequential unintended consequences.
The unstable, brittle edge of the precipice is giving way, and there is nothing but air below.
Thursday, July 2, 2020
SC214-10
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55305.htm
A Bridge To Far
The murder of black people has been a constant in American barbarity since Colonial times. Persistent white murder has caused black agony to erupt in spasms of despair that have only altered its methods, not ended it. White racism, officially supported, has suppressed black outrage but not stifled it. Whites continue to murder blacks but cannot murder black spirit.
After a long, grisly sequence of vicious and legally inexcusable murders by various vile, sociopathic, pseudo-military police forces, the Floyd murder inflamed it again, this time with complex differences. Unlike the national fury after the murder of Dr. King or the storm of rage over Rodney King’s abuse, this explosion can not be described as a “race riot”. Though the murder of a black man triggered it, and though his murder is the central theme around which the phenomenon has coalesced, the great majority of active participants have been white. This is unprecedented.
The question then is whether a small but not negligible minority of white Americans has, in a historically brief time, so developed ethically that it now embraces the deeply humanist creed of the moral giants, Einstein and Schweizer, Eugene Debs and Desmond Tutu. The answer is that it has.
Clearly, many whites have made that ethical climb, or they wouldn’t be in the streets in great numbers over what has been traditionally a black issue. This raises questions. Has definition of a traditionally racist issue morphed from what it historically has been? And is there, in fact, any issue that is strictly racial any more, at least among relatively enlightened whites?
If not, then it follows that for them an existential issue for one race is an issue for all races. This is a huge stretch for the propagandized, deformed American psyche even to grasp, let alone fully to embrace. Stuffed with the poisonous philosophical styrofoam of American Exceptionalism, brains and souls befouled and infused with the shallowest, stupidest, cruelest, latter-day Nazi Ubermensch tripe, Americans are ill-equipped to understand and accept even themselves, much less those we’re schooled by The Empire to regard, around the world, as our subhuman underlings.
Powerful unanimity of purpose between elements of historically alienated “races”--the term is no longer validated by science, btw--not only seriously threatens racism and white dominion, it mortally menaces hegemonist dogma across the board, which makes it deeply terrifying to the American Capitalist Tyranny, its .0001% owner class and its purchased government. Passionate demand for an end to police murder of blacks, for defunding or eliminating these brutal, dishonest gestapos of state-directed terror, is just the most openly hideous crime our diseased system inflicts on all of us.
General awareness of this--taking nothing away from enlightened white empathy with blacks over serial murder-by-cop--is the far broader, denser background reality--as dark matter in the universe is the field and matrix of all that is visible--that with its tremendous gravity has drawn moral whites into genuine brotherhood of purpose with violently traumatized blacks in their frustrated and unending quest for justice in America.
Tragically, as acute observers see, though there is broad and growing comprehension by Americans of the deep falsity and brutal exploitation the State inflicts on the great mass of them, there is neither a committed cadre of inspiring leaders, nor a coherently formulated creed around which a potent public uprising against injustice can coalesce. In place of fused, mobilized, revolutionary unity, we have chaotic, unfocussed desperation.
This will not win. Historically, it never has. The long, sad unwinding of the beautifully, humanely motivated Occupy adventure is the latest case in point. Based on the widely shared conviction of the deeply evil, biocidal character of cheating, lying, obscene, violent, tottering Capitalism, having definite aims and goals, worthy despite the anxious ridicule of the besieged oligarchic state, it lacked the effectual warhead of a committed, passionate leadership with a defined program for elimination and replacement of the gangrenous piratical corpse it courageously opposed. And so, rudderless and internally confused, adrift, subject to attrition and relentless abuse at the hands of the System’s police, it broke, dissolved and faded away.
The reason no such cell of visionary leaders of a potent revolutionary creed exists here is neither single nor simple. Capitalist America--the monstrous corporate combine that owns and controls the State--has waged ruthless war against any politics intended to benefit the people, but repression alone has never eliminated determined political opposition anywhere. Decades of highly sophisticated propaganda has debased and lobotomized a victimized electorate but cannot eradicate intelligences that rise above it. A rebel group can be bought off if traitors run it but never from principled leaders and we’ve had public men who have not sold out and given their all to oppose our vicious system in years gone by, though we have none now. The best of them were undermined and sabotaged by the very organs of law so falsely celebrated as incorruptible and independent of co-optation.
The fact is that the combination of repression, propaganda, and legal malfeasance, have so thoroughly strangled truth in America that coalescence of a core team of the best minds and hearts is impossible. And even if it were not, absolute control of all organs and platforms of communication with American citizens belongs to the criminal State.
Does the lack of guiding hardcore cadre mean that this broad, inspired effort will come to nothing? Well, no, in the sense that Occupy didn’t come to nothing, and its effects outlived its endeavors, still reaching hearts and opening minds. It has already, in its main intent--demand for an end to police murder, for defunding, dissolution, and repurposing of the hideous Waffen SS ethic it has come to embody--made waves of progress that, regardless of success or failure, will never completely subside.
That said, the fantasy of a revolutionary transformation of the Capitalist Tyranny is just that. The movement, embodying in an inchoate way so much that is profoundly just and fervently desired by the most aware and enlightened Americans, lacks the social power it would need to break and replace our dirty, dying Empire and its antibiotic system.
A wise man observed that human history is a race between education and disaster. The great hope of the moment is that sheer fear of the people will bring to an end the sick Nazification of American police systems, for blacks above all, but in reality for all of us.
Overthrow of the Capitalist Tyranny depends, though, on irresistible citizen action based on a deeply informed conviction of its irremediable evil, and unshakable resolve to destroy it. The furious drive of the Capitalist Tyranny toward ecocide and our own extinction may not give us time to get there.
Nature has evidently had all the abuse she’s going to take from Capitalism.
A Bridge To Far
The murder of black people has been a constant in American barbarity since Colonial times. Persistent white murder has caused black agony to erupt in spasms of despair that have only altered its methods, not ended it. White racism, officially supported, has suppressed black outrage but not stifled it. Whites continue to murder blacks but cannot murder black spirit.
After a long, grisly sequence of vicious and legally inexcusable murders by various vile, sociopathic, pseudo-military police forces, the Floyd murder inflamed it again, this time with complex differences. Unlike the national fury after the murder of Dr. King or the storm of rage over Rodney King’s abuse, this explosion can not be described as a “race riot”. Though the murder of a black man triggered it, and though his murder is the central theme around which the phenomenon has coalesced, the great majority of active participants have been white. This is unprecedented.
The question then is whether a small but not negligible minority of white Americans has, in a historically brief time, so developed ethically that it now embraces the deeply humanist creed of the moral giants, Einstein and Schweizer, Eugene Debs and Desmond Tutu. The answer is that it has.
Clearly, many whites have made that ethical climb, or they wouldn’t be in the streets in great numbers over what has been traditionally a black issue. This raises questions. Has definition of a traditionally racist issue morphed from what it historically has been? And is there, in fact, any issue that is strictly racial any more, at least among relatively enlightened whites?
If not, then it follows that for them an existential issue for one race is an issue for all races. This is a huge stretch for the propagandized, deformed American psyche even to grasp, let alone fully to embrace. Stuffed with the poisonous philosophical styrofoam of American Exceptionalism, brains and souls befouled and infused with the shallowest, stupidest, cruelest, latter-day Nazi Ubermensch tripe, Americans are ill-equipped to understand and accept even themselves, much less those we’re schooled by The Empire to regard, around the world, as our subhuman underlings.
Powerful unanimity of purpose between elements of historically alienated “races”--the term is no longer validated by science, btw--not only seriously threatens racism and white dominion, it mortally menaces hegemonist dogma across the board, which makes it deeply terrifying to the American Capitalist Tyranny, its .0001% owner class and its purchased government. Passionate demand for an end to police murder of blacks, for defunding or eliminating these brutal, dishonest gestapos of state-directed terror, is just the most openly hideous crime our diseased system inflicts on all of us.
General awareness of this--taking nothing away from enlightened white empathy with blacks over serial murder-by-cop--is the far broader, denser background reality--as dark matter in the universe is the field and matrix of all that is visible--that with its tremendous gravity has drawn moral whites into genuine brotherhood of purpose with violently traumatized blacks in their frustrated and unending quest for justice in America.
Tragically, as acute observers see, though there is broad and growing comprehension by Americans of the deep falsity and brutal exploitation the State inflicts on the great mass of them, there is neither a committed cadre of inspiring leaders, nor a coherently formulated creed around which a potent public uprising against injustice can coalesce. In place of fused, mobilized, revolutionary unity, we have chaotic, unfocussed desperation.
This will not win. Historically, it never has. The long, sad unwinding of the beautifully, humanely motivated Occupy adventure is the latest case in point. Based on the widely shared conviction of the deeply evil, biocidal character of cheating, lying, obscene, violent, tottering Capitalism, having definite aims and goals, worthy despite the anxious ridicule of the besieged oligarchic state, it lacked the effectual warhead of a committed, passionate leadership with a defined program for elimination and replacement of the gangrenous piratical corpse it courageously opposed. And so, rudderless and internally confused, adrift, subject to attrition and relentless abuse at the hands of the System’s police, it broke, dissolved and faded away.
The reason no such cell of visionary leaders of a potent revolutionary creed exists here is neither single nor simple. Capitalist America--the monstrous corporate combine that owns and controls the State--has waged ruthless war against any politics intended to benefit the people, but repression alone has never eliminated determined political opposition anywhere. Decades of highly sophisticated propaganda has debased and lobotomized a victimized electorate but cannot eradicate intelligences that rise above it. A rebel group can be bought off if traitors run it but never from principled leaders and we’ve had public men who have not sold out and given their all to oppose our vicious system in years gone by, though we have none now. The best of them were undermined and sabotaged by the very organs of law so falsely celebrated as incorruptible and independent of co-optation.
The fact is that the combination of repression, propaganda, and legal malfeasance, have so thoroughly strangled truth in America that coalescence of a core team of the best minds and hearts is impossible. And even if it were not, absolute control of all organs and platforms of communication with American citizens belongs to the criminal State.
Does the lack of guiding hardcore cadre mean that this broad, inspired effort will come to nothing? Well, no, in the sense that Occupy didn’t come to nothing, and its effects outlived its endeavors, still reaching hearts and opening minds. It has already, in its main intent--demand for an end to police murder, for defunding, dissolution, and repurposing of the hideous Waffen SS ethic it has come to embody--made waves of progress that, regardless of success or failure, will never completely subside.
That said, the fantasy of a revolutionary transformation of the Capitalist Tyranny is just that. The movement, embodying in an inchoate way so much that is profoundly just and fervently desired by the most aware and enlightened Americans, lacks the social power it would need to break and replace our dirty, dying Empire and its antibiotic system.
A wise man observed that human history is a race between education and disaster. The great hope of the moment is that sheer fear of the people will bring to an end the sick Nazification of American police systems, for blacks above all, but in reality for all of us.
Overthrow of the Capitalist Tyranny depends, though, on irresistible citizen action based on a deeply informed conviction of its irremediable evil, and unshakable resolve to destroy it. The furious drive of the Capitalist Tyranny toward ecocide and our own extinction may not give us time to get there.
Nature has evidently had all the abuse she’s going to take from Capitalism.
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
SC214-9
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/07/01/why-the-us-empire-works-so-hard-to-control-the-international-narrative-about-russia/
Why The US Empire Works So Hard To Control The International Narrative About Russia
On a December 2010 episode of Fox News’ Freedom Watch, John Bolton and the show’s host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.
“Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate,” Bolton said. “You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.”
“Do you really believe that?” asked an incredulous Napolitano.
“Absolutely,” Bolton replied.
“You would lie in order to preserve the truth?” asked Napolitano.
“If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it,” Bolton answered.
“Why do people in the government think that the laws of society or the rules don’t apply to them?” Napolitano asked.
“Because they are not dealing in the civil society we live in under the Constitution,” Bolton replied. “They are dealing in the anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”
“But you took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the Constitution mandates certain openness and certain fairness,” Napolitano protested. “You’re willing to do away with that in order to attain a temporary military goal?”
“I think as Justice Jackson said in a famous decision, the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” Bolton said. “And I think defending the United States from foreign threats does require actions that in a normal business environment in the United States we would find unprofessional. I don’t make any apology for it.”
I am going to type a sequence of words that I have never typed before, and don’t expect to ever type again:
John Bolton is right.
Bolton is of course not right in his pathetic spin job on the use of lies to promote military agendas, which just looks like a feeble attempt to justify the psychopathic measures he himself took to deceive the world into consenting to the unforgivably evil invasion of Iraq. What he is right about is that conflicts between nations take place in an “anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”
Individual nations have governments with laws that are enforced by those governments. Since we do not have a single unified government for our planet (at least not yet), the interactions between those governments is largely anarchic, and not in a good way.
“International law”, in reality, only meaningfully exists to the extent that the international community is collectively willing to enforce it. In practice what this means is that only nations which have no influence over the dominant narratives in the international community are subject to “international law”.
This is why you will see leaders in African nations sentenced to prison by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes, but the USA can get away with actually sanctioning ICC personnel if they so much as talk about investigating American war crimes and suffer no consequences for it whatsoever. It is also why Noam Chomsky famously said that if the Nuremberg laws had continued to be applied with fairness and consistency, then every post-war US president would have been hanged.
And this is also why so much effort gets poured into controlling the dominant international narrative about nations like Russia which have resisted being absorbed into the US power alliance. If you have the influence and leverage to control what narratives the international community accepts as true about the behavior of a given targeted nation, then you can do things like manufacture international collaboration with aggressive economic sanctions of the sort Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is currently calling for in response to the the completely unsubstantiated narrative that Russia paid Taliban fighters bounties to kill occupying forces in Afghanistan.
In its ongoing slow-motion third world war against nations which refuse to be absorbed into the blob of the US power alliance, this tight empire-like cluster of allies stands everything to gain by doing whatever it takes to undermine and sabotage Russia in an attempt to shove it off the world stage and eliminate the role it plays in opposing that war. Advancing as many narratives as possible about Russia doing nefarious things on the world stage manufactures consent for international collaboration toward that end in the form of economic warfare, proxy conflicts, NATO expansionism and other measures, as well as facilitating a new arms race by killing the last of the US-Russia nuclear treaties and ensuring a continued imperial military presence in Afghanistan.
We haven’t been shown any hard evidence for Russians paying bounties in Afghanistan, and we almost certainly never will be. This doesn’t matter as far as the imperial propagandists are concerned; they know they don’t need actual facts to get this story believed, they just need narrative control. All the propagandists need to do is say over and over again that Russia paid bounties to kill the troops in Afghanistan in an increasingly assertive and authoritative tone, and after awhile people will start assuming it’s true, just because the propagandists have been doing this.
They’ll add new pieces of data to the narrative, none of which will constitute hard proof of their claims, but after enough “bombshell” stories reported in an assertive and ominous tone of voice, people will start assuming it’s a proven fact that Russia paid those bounties. Narrative managers will be able to simply wave their hands at a disparate, unverified cloud of information and proclaim that it is a mountain of evidence and that anyone doubting all this proof must be a kook. (This by the way is a textbook Gish gallop fallacy, where a bunch of individually weak arguments are presented to give the illusion of a single strong case.)
This is all because “international law” only exists in practical terms to the extent that governments around the world agree to pretend it exists. As long as US-centralized empire is able to control the prevailing narrative about what Russia is doing, that empire will be able to continue to use the pretext of “international law” as a bludgeon against its enemies. That’s all we’re really seeing here.
Why The US Empire Works So Hard To Control The International Narrative About Russia
On a December 2010 episode of Fox News’ Freedom Watch, John Bolton and the show’s host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.
“Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate,” Bolton said. “You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.”
“Do you really believe that?” asked an incredulous Napolitano.
“Absolutely,” Bolton replied.
“You would lie in order to preserve the truth?” asked Napolitano.
“If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it,” Bolton answered.
“Why do people in the government think that the laws of society or the rules don’t apply to them?” Napolitano asked.
“Because they are not dealing in the civil society we live in under the Constitution,” Bolton replied. “They are dealing in the anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”
“But you took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the Constitution mandates certain openness and certain fairness,” Napolitano protested. “You’re willing to do away with that in order to attain a temporary military goal?”
“I think as Justice Jackson said in a famous decision, the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” Bolton said. “And I think defending the United States from foreign threats does require actions that in a normal business environment in the United States we would find unprofessional. I don’t make any apology for it.”
I am going to type a sequence of words that I have never typed before, and don’t expect to ever type again:
John Bolton is right.
Bolton is of course not right in his pathetic spin job on the use of lies to promote military agendas, which just looks like a feeble attempt to justify the psychopathic measures he himself took to deceive the world into consenting to the unforgivably evil invasion of Iraq. What he is right about is that conflicts between nations take place in an “anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”
Individual nations have governments with laws that are enforced by those governments. Since we do not have a single unified government for our planet (at least not yet), the interactions between those governments is largely anarchic, and not in a good way.
“International law”, in reality, only meaningfully exists to the extent that the international community is collectively willing to enforce it. In practice what this means is that only nations which have no influence over the dominant narratives in the international community are subject to “international law”.
This is why you will see leaders in African nations sentenced to prison by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes, but the USA can get away with actually sanctioning ICC personnel if they so much as talk about investigating American war crimes and suffer no consequences for it whatsoever. It is also why Noam Chomsky famously said that if the Nuremberg laws had continued to be applied with fairness and consistency, then every post-war US president would have been hanged.
And this is also why so much effort gets poured into controlling the dominant international narrative about nations like Russia which have resisted being absorbed into the US power alliance. If you have the influence and leverage to control what narratives the international community accepts as true about the behavior of a given targeted nation, then you can do things like manufacture international collaboration with aggressive economic sanctions of the sort Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is currently calling for in response to the the completely unsubstantiated narrative that Russia paid Taliban fighters bounties to kill occupying forces in Afghanistan.
In its ongoing slow-motion third world war against nations which refuse to be absorbed into the blob of the US power alliance, this tight empire-like cluster of allies stands everything to gain by doing whatever it takes to undermine and sabotage Russia in an attempt to shove it off the world stage and eliminate the role it plays in opposing that war. Advancing as many narratives as possible about Russia doing nefarious things on the world stage manufactures consent for international collaboration toward that end in the form of economic warfare, proxy conflicts, NATO expansionism and other measures, as well as facilitating a new arms race by killing the last of the US-Russia nuclear treaties and ensuring a continued imperial military presence in Afghanistan.
We haven’t been shown any hard evidence for Russians paying bounties in Afghanistan, and we almost certainly never will be. This doesn’t matter as far as the imperial propagandists are concerned; they know they don’t need actual facts to get this story believed, they just need narrative control. All the propagandists need to do is say over and over again that Russia paid bounties to kill the troops in Afghanistan in an increasingly assertive and authoritative tone, and after awhile people will start assuming it’s true, just because the propagandists have been doing this.
They’ll add new pieces of data to the narrative, none of which will constitute hard proof of their claims, but after enough “bombshell” stories reported in an assertive and ominous tone of voice, people will start assuming it’s a proven fact that Russia paid those bounties. Narrative managers will be able to simply wave their hands at a disparate, unverified cloud of information and proclaim that it is a mountain of evidence and that anyone doubting all this proof must be a kook. (This by the way is a textbook Gish gallop fallacy, where a bunch of individually weak arguments are presented to give the illusion of a single strong case.)
This is all because “international law” only exists in practical terms to the extent that governments around the world agree to pretend it exists. As long as US-centralized empire is able to control the prevailing narrative about what Russia is doing, that empire will be able to continue to use the pretext of “international law” as a bludgeon against its enemies. That’s all we’re really seeing here.
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