https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly20/Bastille-Day7-20.html
Could America Have a French-Style Revolution?
Since it's Bastille Day, a national holiday in France celebrating the French Revolution, let's ask a question few even think (or dare) to ask: could America have a French-style Revolution? Not in some distant era, but within the next five years?
By French-style Revolution I don't mean the extravagant use of the guillotine, I mean the complete political overthrow of the ruling elites. This overthrow need not be violent; it could be an entirely peaceful electoral rejection of the two-party political elites and the Federal Reserve / banking / financialization elites which together form the neoliberal-neofeudal ruling elites.
The BAU Crowd (business as usual) considers the possibility of such an overthrow of parasitic, predatory elites as remote as a landing by Martians. I suspect they're purposefully blind to the reality that America's elites and institutions are structurally incapable of accepting meaningful reforms that would address the extremes of dysfunction, exploitation, predation and wealth / power / income inequality that characterize America today.
America's elites and institutions have only one systemic response to crisis: do more of what's failed spectacularly.
This inability to acknowledge the reality of their own self-serving incompetence and the deeply dysfunctional nature of virtually every level of America's economic, social and political orders leaves an overthrow of the entire ruling elite as the only option left other than resignation to Bread and Circuses funded by the Fed, a policy of desperation that will inevitably debauch the U.S. dollar and impoverish everyone who counted on Bread and Circuses to fix what's broken.
Counting on Fed-funded Bread and Circuses to fix what's broken is the perfection of magical thinking, a state of denial expressed by the phrase routinely (but apparently falsely) attributed to Marie Antoinette, when she learned that the peasants had no bread: Then let them eat brioche (roughly translated into "cake" in English).
Ignoring the horror of the delusional BAU Crowd, let's explore the set-up for a French-style Revolution in America.
Setting aside the horrors of the guillotine, the French Revolution was many things unfolding at once:
-- The failure of the Monarchy's money system, as inflation soared to the point commoners could no longer afford bread. (The price of bread peaked the week that the Bastille was stormed by mobs.)
-- The overthrow of the state-religion nexus in favor of Enlightenment rationalism.
-- The romantic ascent of liberty as the rallying cry against an oppressive feudal hierarchy.
-- The fragmentation of the social and political orders into warring factions.
-- The failure of the Monarchy's institutions to recognize and understand the potentially fatal challenges and institute reforms that addressed the problems.
-- The failure of the French economy, which was plagued by poor roads and communication lines, limited trade due to regional fragmentation and low levels of productive investment.
-- Geopolitical rivalries with Great Britain, the rising power of the Germanic states and other continental European powers (Russia, Austria, Sweden).
In sum, institutions that had failed collapsed and were replaced, first by Napoleon's centralized bureaucracies and later by political reforms, a process that took much of the 19th century to play out.
I think the parallels to America in 2020 are obvious, if inexact.
Most importantly, America's core institutions have failed: the financial system, healthcare, higher education, the political process and the national defense/intelligence complex.
In every case, a class of insiders has come to dominate each centralized hierarchy for its own benefit. Blinded by their greed and hubris, they cannot recognize or understand the systemic failure they inhabit because their attachment to their position, privilege and power is blindingly strong.
Reform is impossible, for as with the French Monarchy, the existing system is the wrong structure and unit size, to borrow a phrase from Peter Drucker. Reforms profound enough to actually repair what's broken would require the insiders surrender much of their position, privilege and power, which they will never do.
As I have taken pains to explain, finance capitalism has fatally distorted the American economy in ways that few understand (or want to understand, since it's so disturbing).
The resulting concentration of wealth and power has also fatally distorted the political process of governance.
As I explained in my books Resistance, Revolution, Liberation and Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege, America's systems only function when there is more of everything to distribute, i.e. "growth": more money, more goods and services, more political power.
When there is less of everything, America's institutions fail because they have no mechanisms for DeGrowth / contraction.
This is the result of their systemic structure as centralized hierarchies. Expansion is effortless, contraction breaks the system. (See the chart of the rising wedge model of breakdown below.)
Much is being made of the fragmentation of American society into so-called progressive-conservative camps, and perhaps the best way to understand this fragmentation is that both camps recognize the failure of American institutions but differ on how to reform them.
Given that America's institutions only function with "more of everything," a reality that aligns with America's zeitgeist of "there's always more of everything," I consider it inevitable that whomever is in power will enthusiastically embrace the illusory "solution" of printing trillions of dollars out of thin air, in the delusional confidence that the world's appetite for dollars is essentially infinite.
Put another way: America finds it comforting to assume that it will always be able to digitally create "money" out of thin air and trade this "nothing" for real goods, i.e. "something."
That America has gotten away with this magic for decades only fuels the confidence of those who reckon the way to "get more of everything" is so easy and simple: just create another few trillion dollars out of thin air and buy the world's resources with this "free money."
Eventually the rest of the world will tire of this fraud, and America will face the loss of its magic printing press.
At that point, inflation will destroy the purchasing power of the US dollar and commoners will be unable to afford the cost of living.
As with the French Revolution, that will be the trigger for a wholesale replacement of our failed institutions. Whether that replacement can be accomplished within the existing political system will depend on a great many factors that will be unfolding simultaneously and interacting with each other in unpredictable, nonlinear ways.
My work is all about sketching out alternative systems that are non-hierarchical, opt-in, decentralized, adaptive, self-organizing and anti-fragile--everything that our current systems are not.
How do we get from "there"--failed, centralized hierarchies dominated by self-serving insiders-- to "here"--opt-in, decentralized, adaptive, self-organizing and anti-fragile institutions?
Nobody knows, but I suspect the decay of our failed institutions will accelerate rapidly, and we won't have to wait very long to witness the messy transition to new decentralized, localized, flexible non-elite-ruled institutional models.
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
Monday, July 13, 2020
SC215-6
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/job-losses-bankruptcies-and-store-closings-are-all-at-apocalyptic-levels-as-the-u-s-economic-collapse-rolls-on
Job Losses, Bankruptcies And Store Closings Are All At Apocalyptic Levels As The U.S. Economic Collapse Rolls On
The last four months have been an unending nightmare for the U.S. economy. Businesses are shutting down at a pace that we have never seen before in American history, the “retail apocalypse” has reached an entirely new level that none of the experts were anticipating prior to this pandemic, and we are in the midst of the greatest spike in unemployment that the United States has ever experienced. On Thursday, we learned that another 1.3 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, and that number has now been above one million for 16 consecutive weeks. Things were supposed to be “getting back to normal” by now, buy that hasn’t happened. Instead, we continue to see a tsunami of job losses that is absolutely unprecedented in American history.
When we look back at the old peaks for unemployment claims, they almost seem laughable compared to what we are experiencing now…
The highest prior weekly total for new unemployment claims was 695,000, in October 1982, according to Labor Department data. During the Great Recession, the country’s last downturn, weekly claims peaked at 665,000, in March 2009.
For those that aren’t old enough to remember, the recession of the early 1980s and the recession of 2008 and 2009 were both really, really painful.
But of course they weren’t anything like this.
Sometimes it is hard to believe that the numbers have gotten so bad. According to Wolf Richter, the number of continuing claims that were filed last week under all state and federal unemployment programs is the highest that we have ever seen…
The total number of people who continued to claim unemployment compensation in the week ended July 4 under all state and federal unemployment insurance programs, including gig workers, jumped by 1.41 million people, to 32.92 million (not seasonally adjusted), the Department of Labor reported this morning. It was the highest and most gut-wrenching level ever.
The number of people who continue to receive state unemployment insurance (blue columns) has been ticking down, as more people got their jobs back than newly unemployed flooded the state unemployment systems. But the number of people claiming federal unemployment insurance, including gig workers under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, continues to surge (red columns), which causes the total number of people claiming unemployment benefits under all programs to rise
Up to this point, the emergency measures that Congress put in place to help unemployed workers have definitely eased the pain for millions upon millions of people that have lost their jobs, but a number of those emergency measures are about to expire…
Several benefits were developed in March to help ease the financial strains on Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. Those are set to come to an end before July 31, which could impact 20 million Americans, MarketWatch reports. The CARES Act, which was signed into law on March 27 by President Donald Trump, provided benefits like enhanced unemployment payments to supplement lost income from layoffs. It also includes a clause to delay evictions for 120 days.
Of course Congress could choose to extend some or all of the elements in the CARES Act, but that would mean borrowing and spending more giant mountains of money that we do not currently have.
Meanwhile, we are seeing businesses fail at a rate that is absolutely staggering.
According to the Washington Post, more than 100,000 businesses have permanently closed their doors during this pandemic, and Bloomberg just posted an article about 110 major companies that have declared bankruptcy here in 2020…
Retailers, airlines, restaurants. But also sports leagues, a cannabis company and an archdiocese plagued by sex-abuse allegations. These are some of the more than 110 companies that declared bankruptcy in the U.S. this year and blamed Covid-19 in part for their demise.
Sadly, the bankruptcy announcements just keep on coming.
This week, we learned that Brooks Brothers has filed for bankruptcy protection…
The coronavirus pandemic has now claimed one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious retailers.
Brooks Brothers — pioneer of the polo and uniform of the polished prepster — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection from creditors on Wednesday, as it continues to search for a buyer.
That hit me particularly hard, because I have had Brooks Brothers shirts in my closet ever since I was a young man.
They have always made great products, and I just assumed that they would always be around.
Of course lots of other iconic retailers are failing as well. Before too long, naming the major retailers that are still operating successfully may be easier than trying to name the vast number of major retailers that have gone belly up.
Store closings are happening fast and furious these days, and that isn’t likely to change any time soon. Starbucks just announced that they will be closing 400 locations, Dunkin’ Donuts just announced that they will be closing 450 locations, and Bed Bath & Beyond has increased the number of stores that they will be closing to approximately 200…
Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) announced Wednesday that it plans to close roughly 200 stores in the next two years.
The retail chain — which also operates Buybuy Baby, Christmas Tree Shops and Harmon Face Values — said it would be mainly closing Bed Bath & Beyond stores, starting later this year. The announcement came as the company released its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday.
If you are still not convinced that the retail industry is facing an unprecedented cataclysm, I think that the following list will do the trick.
Forbes has been tracking the major store closing announcements of 2020, and their list was recently shared by Zero Hedge…
Forbes’ Store Closure List In 2020
Chuck E Cheese: 54 U.S. stores (bankruptcy)
Destination Maternity: 90 stores (bankruptcy)
GNC: 1,200 stores (bankruptcy)
J. Crew: 54 stores (bankruptcy)
JCPenney JCP: 154 stores (bankruptcy)
K-Mart: 45 stores (bankruptcy)
Modell’s Sporting Goods: 153 stores (bankruptcy)
Neiman Marcus (Last Call): 20 stores (bankruptcy)
Papyrus: 254 stores (bankruptcy)
Pier 1 Imports PIR: 936 stores (bankruptcy)
Sears: 51 stores (bankruptcy)
Signet Jewelers SIG: 232 stores
Stage Stores: 738 stores (liquidating)
Tuesday Morning: 230 stores (bankruptcy)
AC Moore: 145 stores
Art Van Furniture: 190 stores
AT&T: 250 stores
Bath & Body Works: 50 stores
Bed Bath & Beyond: 44 stores
Bloomingdale’s: 1 store
Bose: 11 stores
Chico: 100 stores (estimated)
Children’s Place: 200 stores
Christopher Banks: 30-40 stores
CVS Pharmacy: 22 stores
Earth Fare: 50 stores
Express: 66 stories
Forever 21: 15 stores (estimated)
GameStop GME: 320 stores
Gap: 230 stores
Guess: 100 stores
Hallmark: 16 stores
Lord & Taylor: 30 or 40 stores
Lowe’s Canada: 34 stores
Lucky Market: 32 stores
Macy’s M: 125 stores (over 3 years)
Microsoft: 77 stores
New York & Co: 27 stores
Nordstrom: 16 stores
Office Depot: 90 stores
Olympia Sports: 76 stores
Party City: 21 stores
Starbucks SBUX: 400 stores (over 18 months)
Victoria’s Secret: 250 stores
Walgreen: 100 stores (estimated)
Walmart: 2 stores
Wilson Leather & G.H. Bass: 199 stores
Zara: 1,000 stores worldwide (over 2 years)
This week, the number of newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 has surged to the highest level that we have seen yet, and that means that fear of COVID-19 is going to continue to paralyze economic activity in the United States for the foreseeable future.
That means that many more businesses will be shutting their doors, there will be many more bankruptcies, and millions more Americans will be losing their jobs.
This is what an economic collapse looks like, and it is just getting started.
Job Losses, Bankruptcies And Store Closings Are All At Apocalyptic Levels As The U.S. Economic Collapse Rolls On
The last four months have been an unending nightmare for the U.S. economy. Businesses are shutting down at a pace that we have never seen before in American history, the “retail apocalypse” has reached an entirely new level that none of the experts were anticipating prior to this pandemic, and we are in the midst of the greatest spike in unemployment that the United States has ever experienced. On Thursday, we learned that another 1.3 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, and that number has now been above one million for 16 consecutive weeks. Things were supposed to be “getting back to normal” by now, buy that hasn’t happened. Instead, we continue to see a tsunami of job losses that is absolutely unprecedented in American history.
When we look back at the old peaks for unemployment claims, they almost seem laughable compared to what we are experiencing now…
The highest prior weekly total for new unemployment claims was 695,000, in October 1982, according to Labor Department data. During the Great Recession, the country’s last downturn, weekly claims peaked at 665,000, in March 2009.
For those that aren’t old enough to remember, the recession of the early 1980s and the recession of 2008 and 2009 were both really, really painful.
But of course they weren’t anything like this.
Sometimes it is hard to believe that the numbers have gotten so bad. According to Wolf Richter, the number of continuing claims that were filed last week under all state and federal unemployment programs is the highest that we have ever seen…
The total number of people who continued to claim unemployment compensation in the week ended July 4 under all state and federal unemployment insurance programs, including gig workers, jumped by 1.41 million people, to 32.92 million (not seasonally adjusted), the Department of Labor reported this morning. It was the highest and most gut-wrenching level ever.
The number of people who continue to receive state unemployment insurance (blue columns) has been ticking down, as more people got their jobs back than newly unemployed flooded the state unemployment systems. But the number of people claiming federal unemployment insurance, including gig workers under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, continues to surge (red columns), which causes the total number of people claiming unemployment benefits under all programs to rise
Up to this point, the emergency measures that Congress put in place to help unemployed workers have definitely eased the pain for millions upon millions of people that have lost their jobs, but a number of those emergency measures are about to expire…
Several benefits were developed in March to help ease the financial strains on Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. Those are set to come to an end before July 31, which could impact 20 million Americans, MarketWatch reports. The CARES Act, which was signed into law on March 27 by President Donald Trump, provided benefits like enhanced unemployment payments to supplement lost income from layoffs. It also includes a clause to delay evictions for 120 days.
Of course Congress could choose to extend some or all of the elements in the CARES Act, but that would mean borrowing and spending more giant mountains of money that we do not currently have.
Meanwhile, we are seeing businesses fail at a rate that is absolutely staggering.
According to the Washington Post, more than 100,000 businesses have permanently closed their doors during this pandemic, and Bloomberg just posted an article about 110 major companies that have declared bankruptcy here in 2020…
Retailers, airlines, restaurants. But also sports leagues, a cannabis company and an archdiocese plagued by sex-abuse allegations. These are some of the more than 110 companies that declared bankruptcy in the U.S. this year and blamed Covid-19 in part for their demise.
Sadly, the bankruptcy announcements just keep on coming.
This week, we learned that Brooks Brothers has filed for bankruptcy protection…
The coronavirus pandemic has now claimed one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious retailers.
Brooks Brothers — pioneer of the polo and uniform of the polished prepster — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection from creditors on Wednesday, as it continues to search for a buyer.
That hit me particularly hard, because I have had Brooks Brothers shirts in my closet ever since I was a young man.
They have always made great products, and I just assumed that they would always be around.
Of course lots of other iconic retailers are failing as well. Before too long, naming the major retailers that are still operating successfully may be easier than trying to name the vast number of major retailers that have gone belly up.
Store closings are happening fast and furious these days, and that isn’t likely to change any time soon. Starbucks just announced that they will be closing 400 locations, Dunkin’ Donuts just announced that they will be closing 450 locations, and Bed Bath & Beyond has increased the number of stores that they will be closing to approximately 200…
Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) announced Wednesday that it plans to close roughly 200 stores in the next two years.
The retail chain — which also operates Buybuy Baby, Christmas Tree Shops and Harmon Face Values — said it would be mainly closing Bed Bath & Beyond stores, starting later this year. The announcement came as the company released its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday.
If you are still not convinced that the retail industry is facing an unprecedented cataclysm, I think that the following list will do the trick.
Forbes has been tracking the major store closing announcements of 2020, and their list was recently shared by Zero Hedge…
Forbes’ Store Closure List In 2020
Chuck E Cheese: 54 U.S. stores (bankruptcy)
Destination Maternity: 90 stores (bankruptcy)
GNC: 1,200 stores (bankruptcy)
J. Crew: 54 stores (bankruptcy)
JCPenney JCP: 154 stores (bankruptcy)
K-Mart: 45 stores (bankruptcy)
Modell’s Sporting Goods: 153 stores (bankruptcy)
Neiman Marcus (Last Call): 20 stores (bankruptcy)
Papyrus: 254 stores (bankruptcy)
Pier 1 Imports PIR: 936 stores (bankruptcy)
Sears: 51 stores (bankruptcy)
Signet Jewelers SIG: 232 stores
Stage Stores: 738 stores (liquidating)
Tuesday Morning: 230 stores (bankruptcy)
AC Moore: 145 stores
Art Van Furniture: 190 stores
AT&T: 250 stores
Bath & Body Works: 50 stores
Bed Bath & Beyond: 44 stores
Bloomingdale’s: 1 store
Bose: 11 stores
Chico: 100 stores (estimated)
Children’s Place: 200 stores
Christopher Banks: 30-40 stores
CVS Pharmacy: 22 stores
Earth Fare: 50 stores
Express: 66 stories
Forever 21: 15 stores (estimated)
GameStop GME: 320 stores
Gap: 230 stores
Guess: 100 stores
Hallmark: 16 stores
Lord & Taylor: 30 or 40 stores
Lowe’s Canada: 34 stores
Lucky Market: 32 stores
Macy’s M: 125 stores (over 3 years)
Microsoft: 77 stores
New York & Co: 27 stores
Nordstrom: 16 stores
Office Depot: 90 stores
Olympia Sports: 76 stores
Party City: 21 stores
Starbucks SBUX: 400 stores (over 18 months)
Victoria’s Secret: 250 stores
Walgreen: 100 stores (estimated)
Walmart: 2 stores
Wilson Leather & G.H. Bass: 199 stores
Zara: 1,000 stores worldwide (over 2 years)
This week, the number of newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 has surged to the highest level that we have seen yet, and that means that fear of COVID-19 is going to continue to paralyze economic activity in the United States for the foreseeable future.
That means that many more businesses will be shutting their doors, there will be many more bankruptcies, and millions more Americans will be losing their jobs.
This is what an economic collapse looks like, and it is just getting started.
Sunday, July 12, 2020
SC215-5
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly20/titanic7-20.html
The Sinking Titanic's Great Pumps Finally Fail
On April 14, 1912, the liner Titanic, considered unsinkable due to its watertight compartments and other features, struck a glancing blow against a massive iceberg on that moonless, weirdly calm night. In the early hours of April 15, the great ship broke in half and sank, ending the lives of the majority of its passengers and crew.
The usual analogy drawn between the Titanic and our financial meltdown stems from the initial complacency of the passengers after the collision. Some passengers went on deck to play with the ice scraped off the berg, while most returned to the festivities still working their magic as midnight approached.
The class structure of Edwardian Britain soon came into play, however; as the situation grew visibly threatening, the First Class passengers were herded into the few lifeboats while the steerage/Third Class passengers--many of them immigrants--were mostly kept below decks, sealing their doom.
But there are even more compelling analogies than initial complacency turning to panic. Consider this diagram of the great ship:
The large black rectangles on the lower deck represent the coal bunkers; they were located adjacent to the boilers which powered the engines. Though the ship only scraped against the iceberg, as Titanic explorer Robert Ballard explains, that was enough to pop rivets and open hull plates:
The glancing blow that ruptured the Titanic's hull over a distance of roughly 250 feet (out of a full length of 882 feet) and admitted water into six of her compartments sealed her fate.
Considerable hullabaloo attended the attempt in the summer of 1996 to raise a piece of the hull from the debris field, but far more interesting was the ultrasound investigation of the area of the bow damaged by the iceberg. These images revealed six small tears or openings affecting the first six compartments. Just as we had surmised in 1986, the great gash was a myth and the actual openings into the ship seem to have been the result of rivets popping and hull plates separating.
This offers a very powerful analogy to the fatal damage inflicted on our financial system by an apparently "glancing blow" with the pandemic shutdown. Just as the Titanic was mortally wounded not by great tears in its hull but by the buckling of steel hull plates, so the U.S. (and thus global) financial system is sinking from similarly "glancing" blows.
The actual damage could have been contained--do you sense another analogy about to surface?-- had the fifth watertight bulwark--shall we call it "the bulwark against systemic failure"?-- extended a few decks higher. But inexplicably, this watertight barrier did not extend as high as the other watertight bulkheads.
Though the water gushing through a three-foot gash in the forward engine room was held back by the ship's great pumps, as the bow sank lower then water seeped over the fifth watertight bulkhead and gushed into the boiler room, extinguishing the fires that powered the pumps.
This generated a feedback loop: the higher the water rose, the more boilers were extinguished and the less power was available to the pumps.
And so against all "rational odds," the ship's apparently minor structural design flaw led to its inevitable loss as the mighty pumps lost their battle against the rising water.
To all the "experts," the risk of collision with an iceberg were considered low, while the risk of catastrophic damage were considered essentially zero. Hmm, does that remind you of our financial system circa September 2019, just as the great U.S. economy's hull was buckling?
Now we have the Great Pumps of Federal Reserve money-printing and Stimulus, which in a close analogy are pumping trillions of dollars into the sinking U.S. economy. But just as the engines of the Titanic lost power as the water extinguished the boilers supplying steam to the engines, so the stimulus is only keeping the rising water temporarily at bay-- it is not actually saving the "engines" of the economy from sputtering.
And what are those engines?
1. Debt, which must increase to fuel spending, income and thus taxes
2. Rising assets, which provide the basis for ever-more borrowing
3. Government borrowing, which enables government spending to keep rising without regard to actual tax revenues or the health of those being taxed
4. Rising employment as vast borrowing and spending creates new jobs
The ice-cold water is splashing into each of these engines. As assets fall then there is simply no foundation (collateral) to support more borrowing. As debt is paid down rather than expanded, then spending falls. As spending falls, so do revenues, profits and employment, all of which crimp tax revenues.
The last engine is government borrowing. To those still standing on the sloping deck, cheering the "good news" of Big Tech's meteoric ascent to the heavens of bubble overvaluation, this seems like the engine which can never be extinguished. Through thick and thin the Federal government and the state and local governments (via muni bonds) have been able to borrow and spend stupendous sums seemingly without consequence.
The demise of this last great engine will surprise as many as the sinking of the Titanic did, but it is as inevitable as the sinking of the great ship. The pumps can only hold the water back for a while, but the Stimulus magic will expire sooner than anyone imagines.
As the government scrambles to find buyers for endless trillions in new U.S. bonds (and trillions more in new corporate debt, new mortgages, new consumer debt, student loans, new muni debt, etc.) then interest rates will rise and the great engine of ever-greater debt will hiss and sigh as the water rises and then go silent and cold.
The first-class passengers have already been ushered to their lifeboats. They've sold to the euphoric passengers buying Big Tech's parabolic ascent and the greater fools still partying in the first-class lounge who are in denial that even the greatest, most technologically advanced ship can sink, taking everyone in denial down with it.
The sinking is not a possibility, it is an inevitability.
The Sinking Titanic's Great Pumps Finally Fail
On April 14, 1912, the liner Titanic, considered unsinkable due to its watertight compartments and other features, struck a glancing blow against a massive iceberg on that moonless, weirdly calm night. In the early hours of April 15, the great ship broke in half and sank, ending the lives of the majority of its passengers and crew.
The usual analogy drawn between the Titanic and our financial meltdown stems from the initial complacency of the passengers after the collision. Some passengers went on deck to play with the ice scraped off the berg, while most returned to the festivities still working their magic as midnight approached.
The class structure of Edwardian Britain soon came into play, however; as the situation grew visibly threatening, the First Class passengers were herded into the few lifeboats while the steerage/Third Class passengers--many of them immigrants--were mostly kept below decks, sealing their doom.
But there are even more compelling analogies than initial complacency turning to panic. Consider this diagram of the great ship:
The large black rectangles on the lower deck represent the coal bunkers; they were located adjacent to the boilers which powered the engines. Though the ship only scraped against the iceberg, as Titanic explorer Robert Ballard explains, that was enough to pop rivets and open hull plates:
The glancing blow that ruptured the Titanic's hull over a distance of roughly 250 feet (out of a full length of 882 feet) and admitted water into six of her compartments sealed her fate.
Considerable hullabaloo attended the attempt in the summer of 1996 to raise a piece of the hull from the debris field, but far more interesting was the ultrasound investigation of the area of the bow damaged by the iceberg. These images revealed six small tears or openings affecting the first six compartments. Just as we had surmised in 1986, the great gash was a myth and the actual openings into the ship seem to have been the result of rivets popping and hull plates separating.
This offers a very powerful analogy to the fatal damage inflicted on our financial system by an apparently "glancing blow" with the pandemic shutdown. Just as the Titanic was mortally wounded not by great tears in its hull but by the buckling of steel hull plates, so the U.S. (and thus global) financial system is sinking from similarly "glancing" blows.
The actual damage could have been contained--do you sense another analogy about to surface?-- had the fifth watertight bulwark--shall we call it "the bulwark against systemic failure"?-- extended a few decks higher. But inexplicably, this watertight barrier did not extend as high as the other watertight bulkheads.
Though the water gushing through a three-foot gash in the forward engine room was held back by the ship's great pumps, as the bow sank lower then water seeped over the fifth watertight bulkhead and gushed into the boiler room, extinguishing the fires that powered the pumps.
This generated a feedback loop: the higher the water rose, the more boilers were extinguished and the less power was available to the pumps.
And so against all "rational odds," the ship's apparently minor structural design flaw led to its inevitable loss as the mighty pumps lost their battle against the rising water.
To all the "experts," the risk of collision with an iceberg were considered low, while the risk of catastrophic damage were considered essentially zero. Hmm, does that remind you of our financial system circa September 2019, just as the great U.S. economy's hull was buckling?
Now we have the Great Pumps of Federal Reserve money-printing and Stimulus, which in a close analogy are pumping trillions of dollars into the sinking U.S. economy. But just as the engines of the Titanic lost power as the water extinguished the boilers supplying steam to the engines, so the stimulus is only keeping the rising water temporarily at bay-- it is not actually saving the "engines" of the economy from sputtering.
And what are those engines?
1. Debt, which must increase to fuel spending, income and thus taxes
2. Rising assets, which provide the basis for ever-more borrowing
3. Government borrowing, which enables government spending to keep rising without regard to actual tax revenues or the health of those being taxed
4. Rising employment as vast borrowing and spending creates new jobs
The ice-cold water is splashing into each of these engines. As assets fall then there is simply no foundation (collateral) to support more borrowing. As debt is paid down rather than expanded, then spending falls. As spending falls, so do revenues, profits and employment, all of which crimp tax revenues.
The last engine is government borrowing. To those still standing on the sloping deck, cheering the "good news" of Big Tech's meteoric ascent to the heavens of bubble overvaluation, this seems like the engine which can never be extinguished. Through thick and thin the Federal government and the state and local governments (via muni bonds) have been able to borrow and spend stupendous sums seemingly without consequence.
The demise of this last great engine will surprise as many as the sinking of the Titanic did, but it is as inevitable as the sinking of the great ship. The pumps can only hold the water back for a while, but the Stimulus magic will expire sooner than anyone imagines.
As the government scrambles to find buyers for endless trillions in new U.S. bonds (and trillions more in new corporate debt, new mortgages, new consumer debt, student loans, new muni debt, etc.) then interest rates will rise and the great engine of ever-greater debt will hiss and sigh as the water rises and then go silent and cold.
The first-class passengers have already been ushered to their lifeboats. They've sold to the euphoric passengers buying Big Tech's parabolic ascent and the greater fools still partying in the first-class lounge who are in denial that even the greatest, most technologically advanced ship can sink, taking everyone in denial down with it.
The sinking is not a possibility, it is an inevitability.
Saturday, July 11, 2020
SC215-4
https://www.peakprosperity.com/a-serious-message-from-chris-martenson/
A Serious Message From Chris Martenson
Time is running short to brace for impact
Like a windstorm toppling a hollowed-out tree, SARS-CoV-2 didn’t cause the current recession so much as it exposed how rotten things already were.
Even before SARS-CoV-2, households were struggling. Far too many were limping along without any savings at all, one crisis away from financial ruin.
Debts at every level were at record highs before SARS-CoV-2 came along, and the Federal Reserve was already busy bailing out the US financial system before the virus hit.
The shale oil industry had failed to generate any profits for over a decade before anyone ever heard of Covid19.
The worldwide wealth gap was already at record levels before we were forced into lockdown.
What the coronavirus pandemic has done, though, is give the ruling authorities aircover to accelerate all of these trends to warp speed.
Billionaires have been, by far, the largest winners in this story so far. Ditto for mega corporations. Main Street and small and medium-sized businesses have been utterly crushed.
Where the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 could have been — and should have been — a wake-up call to operate the system more equitably and sustainably, it was used instead as an excuse to make things even worse.
No bank executives were charged or even went to jail for any crimes they commited in bringing the financial system to the brink of disaster. Accounting deceit, wire fraud, and forgery — anybody remember ‘robosigning’? That was forgery, a felony, and not one charge was ever leveled. Instead, the Too Big To Fail banks were bailed out and got bigger at the expense of smaller, more responsible firms.
My point here is that SARS-CoV-2 has laid bare our true value systems. Some countries have done an admirable job of showing they care about their citizens, making public safety and health their top priority. Other countries, such as mine (the US), have demonstrated the opposite.
When it comes to making judgments, I look at actions much more than words. What have been the actions of the US authorities so far?
1. The Federal Reserve swooped in to assure that the wealthy got even wealthier.
2. The CDC couldn’t get effective test kits prepared or deployed until months after many other countries did.
3. $Billions and $billions were smoothly and rapidly delivered to the largest institutions, corporations and wealthiest households.
4. But only a single $1200 stimulus check has been sent to the poorest of American families. Well, most of them, but many are still waiting for their stimulus checks. Every household sandwiched between the rich and the poor has received nothing.
In other words, the Fed has made its #1 priority the preservation of the financial advantages of the already-rich, while the federal government has made clear that public health isn’t really a priority at all.
The unfairness and legal and moral wrongness of this next bit of news stunned even long-time skeptics like myself:
I object strenuously to any taxpayer money, my money, being sent to any and all religious organizations (I’m a big believer in the separation of church and state). But to do so to help the Catholic church cover shortfalls due to payouts to victims of institutionalized pedophilia? Really, that’s just…I’m out of words.
But more often than not, that’s the business the federal government is in: protecting the abusers, not the victims.
Thousands of hedge funds and other extremely wealthy financial firms are similarly feeding from the same trough of substantial taxpayer payouts.
But where real support is needed? The free money river has never been more than a trickle. Testing for SARS-CoV-2 has been throttled back due to lack of funding. Hospitals remain chronically short of critical PPE. 30% of all US households were unable to make last month’s mortgage payment.
As I said, these dots simply reveal the values and priorities of those running the show. If I were to use a single word to sum things up, it would be: greed.
Anything and everything that funnels money from the many into the pockets of the few is being done and done swiftly. Any monies directed to the well-being of the masses is being done slowly, grudgingly, and sparingly (if at all). “Never let a good crisis go to waste” is the motto of current crowd in charge.
I am asked all the time to decide between Covid-19 being real or this whole thing being a scam. To which I reply, “why not both?”
The Elites Have Won
The elites have all the power and they have no interest in sharing any of it. They are too blinded by greed and driven by fear to do otherwise.
In this way, they pretty much have won.
They’ll print up however much money they desire and hand it out to themselves — after, of course, laundering it through the ““markets”” to create the appearance that fairness was actually involved.
But we all know it’s not. The data is crystal clear: Wall Street’s mighty siphons assure that nearly all of the Fed’s freshly printed money goes straight into the pockets of the most well-connected players.
As I’ve taken pains to point out, given all the public’s focus on Black Lives Matter, somehow the Federal Reserve has escaped being called out for being a nearly pure-white organization whose efforts overwhelmingly funnel additional funds to white households. Whether by design or accident, the Federal Reserve’s actions do more to cement racial inequality than any other entity, group, or organization in existence. By far.
Looked at another way, Trump is soothed by the stock market hitting new all-time highs and I believe this has blunted the seriousness with which he takes SARS-CoV-2. In jamming the stock markets higher, I see the Federal Reserve as also partly responsible for the lame US response to Covid, which has already cost far too many people their lives and many more people their health.
Of course, intervening in the financial markers to push them higher during an election year is a profoundly political act. Something the Fed has absolutely no business doing.
Put all that together and the Federal Reserve is a partisan, political organization that is costing people their lives and health while promoting racial inequality.
Yet it’s given a nearly free pass on all of that from the mainstream press, our supposed watchdog for truth. Hardly is Fed Chair Jerome Powell ever asked a single daunting question along these lines.
Our health organizations like the CDC and the WHO are similarly compromised and complicit, too shot through with political intrigue and pharma money to be of any help.
All of which is both shameful and self-injurious, because if we’d like to avoid a very dark future filled with societal unraveling, then the Fed’s dangerous actions need to be brought to heel. And soon.
However, after all that has transpired, I don’t see much hope of the Fed changing its ways. It has proven it can’t be goaded or shamed into introspection or altering course.
Conclusion
All of which is my way of saying that I am bracing for impact.
I simply don’t know what else to do. We are on our own.
It’s time to consider how you will provide your family with the basics, the very bottom layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — water, food, shelter, resources, health & safety — if the systems we depend on today start weakening:
When people are busy moving down the Hierarchy of Needs, that means society is crumbling.
And folks are already indeed moving. Literally. Real estate for sale in Manhattan is piling up without takers, while more rural properties are being snapped up. Gardens are being planted and guns are being bought.
SARS-CoV-2 has taught many lessons and revealed much. To me, it’s revealed that the elites as led by the Federal Reserve won’t deviate from accelerating inequity until being forced to stop. Whether that will occur via social revolution, the destruction of the purchasing power of the US dollar, or something else, I don’t know.
But I do know that whatever it is, it won’t be the cause of all the misery that will follow. The true culprits are the current and former managers (not leaders) with the Fed and within the DC beltway who failed to protect the vulnerable, set reasonable policies, and conduct themselves with integrity.
So my advice is to brace for impact. There’s nothing any of us can do to affect national monetary policy or stop the major unraveling trends already set in motion, but we can do our best to step outside harm’s way and tend the welfare of ourselves and those we care about as the system falters.
In Part 2: Brace For Impact! I share the key indicators that have me most concerned about the nearness of the next systemic shock, as well as the key steps I recommend you take now using whatever time remains available to you.
We are facing unprecedented challenges that are accelerating at a faster rate than at any other time in human history. Every day we have left to prepare prudently is a gift. Use the time wisely.
A Serious Message From Chris Martenson
Time is running short to brace for impact
Like a windstorm toppling a hollowed-out tree, SARS-CoV-2 didn’t cause the current recession so much as it exposed how rotten things already were.
Even before SARS-CoV-2, households were struggling. Far too many were limping along without any savings at all, one crisis away from financial ruin.
Debts at every level were at record highs before SARS-CoV-2 came along, and the Federal Reserve was already busy bailing out the US financial system before the virus hit.
The shale oil industry had failed to generate any profits for over a decade before anyone ever heard of Covid19.
The worldwide wealth gap was already at record levels before we were forced into lockdown.
What the coronavirus pandemic has done, though, is give the ruling authorities aircover to accelerate all of these trends to warp speed.
Billionaires have been, by far, the largest winners in this story so far. Ditto for mega corporations. Main Street and small and medium-sized businesses have been utterly crushed.
Where the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 could have been — and should have been — a wake-up call to operate the system more equitably and sustainably, it was used instead as an excuse to make things even worse.
No bank executives were charged or even went to jail for any crimes they commited in bringing the financial system to the brink of disaster. Accounting deceit, wire fraud, and forgery — anybody remember ‘robosigning’? That was forgery, a felony, and not one charge was ever leveled. Instead, the Too Big To Fail banks were bailed out and got bigger at the expense of smaller, more responsible firms.
My point here is that SARS-CoV-2 has laid bare our true value systems. Some countries have done an admirable job of showing they care about their citizens, making public safety and health their top priority. Other countries, such as mine (the US), have demonstrated the opposite.
When it comes to making judgments, I look at actions much more than words. What have been the actions of the US authorities so far?
1. The Federal Reserve swooped in to assure that the wealthy got even wealthier.
2. The CDC couldn’t get effective test kits prepared or deployed until months after many other countries did.
3. $Billions and $billions were smoothly and rapidly delivered to the largest institutions, corporations and wealthiest households.
4. But only a single $1200 stimulus check has been sent to the poorest of American families. Well, most of them, but many are still waiting for their stimulus checks. Every household sandwiched between the rich and the poor has received nothing.
In other words, the Fed has made its #1 priority the preservation of the financial advantages of the already-rich, while the federal government has made clear that public health isn’t really a priority at all.
The unfairness and legal and moral wrongness of this next bit of news stunned even long-time skeptics like myself:
I object strenuously to any taxpayer money, my money, being sent to any and all religious organizations (I’m a big believer in the separation of church and state). But to do so to help the Catholic church cover shortfalls due to payouts to victims of institutionalized pedophilia? Really, that’s just…I’m out of words.
But more often than not, that’s the business the federal government is in: protecting the abusers, not the victims.
Thousands of hedge funds and other extremely wealthy financial firms are similarly feeding from the same trough of substantial taxpayer payouts.
But where real support is needed? The free money river has never been more than a trickle. Testing for SARS-CoV-2 has been throttled back due to lack of funding. Hospitals remain chronically short of critical PPE. 30% of all US households were unable to make last month’s mortgage payment.
As I said, these dots simply reveal the values and priorities of those running the show. If I were to use a single word to sum things up, it would be: greed.
Anything and everything that funnels money from the many into the pockets of the few is being done and done swiftly. Any monies directed to the well-being of the masses is being done slowly, grudgingly, and sparingly (if at all). “Never let a good crisis go to waste” is the motto of current crowd in charge.
I am asked all the time to decide between Covid-19 being real or this whole thing being a scam. To which I reply, “why not both?”
The Elites Have Won
The elites have all the power and they have no interest in sharing any of it. They are too blinded by greed and driven by fear to do otherwise.
In this way, they pretty much have won.
They’ll print up however much money they desire and hand it out to themselves — after, of course, laundering it through the ““markets”” to create the appearance that fairness was actually involved.
But we all know it’s not. The data is crystal clear: Wall Street’s mighty siphons assure that nearly all of the Fed’s freshly printed money goes straight into the pockets of the most well-connected players.
As I’ve taken pains to point out, given all the public’s focus on Black Lives Matter, somehow the Federal Reserve has escaped being called out for being a nearly pure-white organization whose efforts overwhelmingly funnel additional funds to white households. Whether by design or accident, the Federal Reserve’s actions do more to cement racial inequality than any other entity, group, or organization in existence. By far.
Looked at another way, Trump is soothed by the stock market hitting new all-time highs and I believe this has blunted the seriousness with which he takes SARS-CoV-2. In jamming the stock markets higher, I see the Federal Reserve as also partly responsible for the lame US response to Covid, which has already cost far too many people their lives and many more people their health.
Of course, intervening in the financial markers to push them higher during an election year is a profoundly political act. Something the Fed has absolutely no business doing.
Put all that together and the Federal Reserve is a partisan, political organization that is costing people their lives and health while promoting racial inequality.
Yet it’s given a nearly free pass on all of that from the mainstream press, our supposed watchdog for truth. Hardly is Fed Chair Jerome Powell ever asked a single daunting question along these lines.
Our health organizations like the CDC and the WHO are similarly compromised and complicit, too shot through with political intrigue and pharma money to be of any help.
All of which is both shameful and self-injurious, because if we’d like to avoid a very dark future filled with societal unraveling, then the Fed’s dangerous actions need to be brought to heel. And soon.
However, after all that has transpired, I don’t see much hope of the Fed changing its ways. It has proven it can’t be goaded or shamed into introspection or altering course.
Conclusion
All of which is my way of saying that I am bracing for impact.
I simply don’t know what else to do. We are on our own.
It’s time to consider how you will provide your family with the basics, the very bottom layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — water, food, shelter, resources, health & safety — if the systems we depend on today start weakening:
When people are busy moving down the Hierarchy of Needs, that means society is crumbling.
And folks are already indeed moving. Literally. Real estate for sale in Manhattan is piling up without takers, while more rural properties are being snapped up. Gardens are being planted and guns are being bought.
SARS-CoV-2 has taught many lessons and revealed much. To me, it’s revealed that the elites as led by the Federal Reserve won’t deviate from accelerating inequity until being forced to stop. Whether that will occur via social revolution, the destruction of the purchasing power of the US dollar, or something else, I don’t know.
But I do know that whatever it is, it won’t be the cause of all the misery that will follow. The true culprits are the current and former managers (not leaders) with the Fed and within the DC beltway who failed to protect the vulnerable, set reasonable policies, and conduct themselves with integrity.
So my advice is to brace for impact. There’s nothing any of us can do to affect national monetary policy or stop the major unraveling trends already set in motion, but we can do our best to step outside harm’s way and tend the welfare of ourselves and those we care about as the system falters.
In Part 2: Brace For Impact! I share the key indicators that have me most concerned about the nearness of the next systemic shock, as well as the key steps I recommend you take now using whatever time remains available to you.
We are facing unprecedented challenges that are accelerating at a faster rate than at any other time in human history. Every day we have left to prepare prudently is a gift. Use the time wisely.
Friday, July 10, 2020
SC215-3
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/tyranny_without_a_tyrant_the_deep_states_divide_and_conquer_strategy_is_working
Tyranny Without a Tyrant: The Deep State’s Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Is Working
“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” ― Hannah Arendt, On Violence
What exactly is going on?
Is this revolution? Is this anarchy? Is this a spectacle engineered to distract us from the machinations of the police state? Is this a sociological means of re-setting our national equilibrium? Is this a Machiavellian scheme designed to further polarize the populace and undermine our efforts to stand unified against government tyranny? Is this so-called populist uprising actually a manufactured race war and election-year referendum on who should occupy the White House?
Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.
Certainly it’s not leading to more freedom.
This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding.
It must be said: the Black Lives Matter protests have not helped. Inadvertently or intentionally, these protests—tinged with mob violence, rampant incivility, intolerance, and an arrogant disdain for how an open marketplace of ideas can advance freedom—have politicized what should never have been politicized: police brutality and the government’s ongoing assaults on our freedoms.
For one brief moment in the wake of George Floyd’s death, it seemed as if finally “we the people” might put aside our differences long enough to stand united in outrage over the government’s brutality.
That sliver of unity didn’t last.
We may be worse off now than we were before.
Suddenly, no one seems to be talking about any of the egregious governmental abuses that are still wreaking havoc on our freedoms: police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none?
You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.
This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.
It works the same way every time.
The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.
Having allowed our fears to be codified and our actions criminalized, we now find ourselves in a strange new world where just about everything we do is criminalized, even our ability to choose whether or not to wear a mask in public during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Strangely enough, in the face of outright corruption and incompetency on the part of our elected officials, Americans in general remain relatively gullible, eager to be persuaded that the government can solve the problems that plague us, whether it be terrorism, an economic depression, an environmental disaster, or a global pandemic.
We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests. Yet having bought into the false notion that the government does indeed know what’s best for us and can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes—we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.
The lesson is this: once a free people allows the government inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.
Nor does it seem to matter whether it's a Democrat or a Republican at the helm anymore. Indeed, the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government, whose priorities are to milk “we the people” of our hard-earned money (by way of taxes, fines and fees) and remain in control and in power.
Modern government in general—ranging from the militarized police in SWAT team gear crashing through our doors to the rash of innocent citizens being gunned down by police to the invasive spying on everything we do—is acting illogically, even psychopathically. (The characteristics of a psychopath include a “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one's actions, among others.”)
When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, and then jails us if we dare step out of line, punishes us unjustly without remorse, and refuses to own up to its failings, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”
So where does that leave us?
Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.
Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.
The pickle we find ourselves in speaks volumes about the nature of the government beast we have been saddled with and how it views the rights and sovereignty of “we the people.”
Now you don’t hear a lot about sovereignty anymore. Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.
In other words, in America, “we the people”— sovereign citizens—call the shots.
So when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.
That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?
In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.
The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.” Worst of all, “we the people” have become desensitized to this constant undermining of our freedoms.
How do we reconcile the Founders’ vision of the government as an entity whose only purpose is to serve the people with the police state’s insistence that the government is the supreme authority, that its power trumps that of the people themselves, and that it may exercise that power in any way it sees fit (that includes government agents crashing through doors, mass arrests, ethnic cleansing, racial profiling, indefinite detentions without due process, and internment camps)?
They cannot be reconciled. They are polar opposites.
We are fast approaching a moment of reckoning where we will be forced to choose between the vision of what America was intended to be (a model for self-governance where power is vested in the people) and the reality of what it has become (a police state where power is vested in the government).
This slide into totalitarianism—helped along by overcriminalization, government surveillance, militarized police, neighbors turning in neighbors, privatized prisons, and forced labor camps, to name just a few similarities—is tracking very closely with what happened in Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.
We are walking a dangerous path right now.
No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people.
Despite what is taught in school and the propaganda that is peddled by the media, the 2020 presidential election is not a populist election for a representative. Rather, it’s a gathering of shareholders to select the next CEO, a fact reinforced by the nation’s archaic electoral college system.
Anyone who believes that this election will bring about any real change in how the American government does business is either incredibly naïve, woefully out-of-touch, or oblivious to the fact that as an in-depth Princeton University study shows, we now live in an oligarchy that is “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.”
When a country spends close to $10 billion on elections to select what is, for all intents and purposes, a glorified homecoming king or queen to occupy the White House and fill other government seats, while more than 40 million of its people live in poverty, more than 40 million Americans are on unemployment, more than 500,000 Americans are homeless, and analysts forecast it will take a decade to work our way out of the current COVID-induced recession, that’s a country whose priorities are out of step with the needs of its people.
Be warned, however: the Establishment—the Deep State and its corporate partners that really run the show, pull the strings and dictate the policies, no matter who occupies the Oval Office—is not going to allow anyone to take office who will unravel their power structures. Those who have attempted to do so in the past have been effectively put out of commission.
Voting sustains the illusion that we have a democratic republic, but it is merely a dictatorship in disguise, or what political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately refer to as an “economic élite domination.”
In such an environment, the economic elite (lobbyists, corporations, monied special interest groups) dictate national policy. As the Princeton University oligarchy study indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. As such, the citizenry has little if any impact on the policies of government.
We have been saddled with a two-party system and fooled into believing that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when in fact, the two parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted, both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty
We’re drowning under the weight of too much debt, too many wars, too much power in the hands of a centralized government run by a corporate elite, too many militarized police, too many laws, too many lobbyists, and generally too much bad news.
The powers-that-be want us to believe that our job as citizens begins and ends on Election Day. They want us to believe that we have no right to complain about the state of the nation unless we’ve cast our vote one way or the other. They want us to remain divided over politics, hostile to those with whom we disagree politically, and intolerant of anyone or anything whose solutions to what ails this country differ from our own.
What they don’t want us talking about is the fact that the government is corrupt, the system is rigged, the politicians don’t represent us, the electoral college is a joke, most of the candidates are frauds, and, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we as a nation are repeating the mistakes of history—namely, allowing a totalitarian state to reign over us.
Former concentration camp inmate Hannah Arendt warned against this when she wrote, “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”
As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?
Never forget that the lesser of two evils is still evil.
Tyranny Without a Tyrant: The Deep State’s Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Is Working
“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” ― Hannah Arendt, On Violence
What exactly is going on?
Is this revolution? Is this anarchy? Is this a spectacle engineered to distract us from the machinations of the police state? Is this a sociological means of re-setting our national equilibrium? Is this a Machiavellian scheme designed to further polarize the populace and undermine our efforts to stand unified against government tyranny? Is this so-called populist uprising actually a manufactured race war and election-year referendum on who should occupy the White House?
Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.
Certainly it’s not leading to more freedom.
This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding.
It must be said: the Black Lives Matter protests have not helped. Inadvertently or intentionally, these protests—tinged with mob violence, rampant incivility, intolerance, and an arrogant disdain for how an open marketplace of ideas can advance freedom—have politicized what should never have been politicized: police brutality and the government’s ongoing assaults on our freedoms.
For one brief moment in the wake of George Floyd’s death, it seemed as if finally “we the people” might put aside our differences long enough to stand united in outrage over the government’s brutality.
That sliver of unity didn’t last.
We may be worse off now than we were before.
Suddenly, no one seems to be talking about any of the egregious governmental abuses that are still wreaking havoc on our freedoms: police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none?
You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.
This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.
It works the same way every time.
The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.
Having allowed our fears to be codified and our actions criminalized, we now find ourselves in a strange new world where just about everything we do is criminalized, even our ability to choose whether or not to wear a mask in public during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Strangely enough, in the face of outright corruption and incompetency on the part of our elected officials, Americans in general remain relatively gullible, eager to be persuaded that the government can solve the problems that plague us, whether it be terrorism, an economic depression, an environmental disaster, or a global pandemic.
We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests. Yet having bought into the false notion that the government does indeed know what’s best for us and can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes—we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.
The lesson is this: once a free people allows the government inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.
Nor does it seem to matter whether it's a Democrat or a Republican at the helm anymore. Indeed, the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government, whose priorities are to milk “we the people” of our hard-earned money (by way of taxes, fines and fees) and remain in control and in power.
Modern government in general—ranging from the militarized police in SWAT team gear crashing through our doors to the rash of innocent citizens being gunned down by police to the invasive spying on everything we do—is acting illogically, even psychopathically. (The characteristics of a psychopath include a “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one's actions, among others.”)
When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, and then jails us if we dare step out of line, punishes us unjustly without remorse, and refuses to own up to its failings, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”
So where does that leave us?
Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.
Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.
The pickle we find ourselves in speaks volumes about the nature of the government beast we have been saddled with and how it views the rights and sovereignty of “we the people.”
Now you don’t hear a lot about sovereignty anymore. Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.
In other words, in America, “we the people”— sovereign citizens—call the shots.
So when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.
That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?
In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.
The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.” Worst of all, “we the people” have become desensitized to this constant undermining of our freedoms.
How do we reconcile the Founders’ vision of the government as an entity whose only purpose is to serve the people with the police state’s insistence that the government is the supreme authority, that its power trumps that of the people themselves, and that it may exercise that power in any way it sees fit (that includes government agents crashing through doors, mass arrests, ethnic cleansing, racial profiling, indefinite detentions without due process, and internment camps)?
They cannot be reconciled. They are polar opposites.
We are fast approaching a moment of reckoning where we will be forced to choose between the vision of what America was intended to be (a model for self-governance where power is vested in the people) and the reality of what it has become (a police state where power is vested in the government).
This slide into totalitarianism—helped along by overcriminalization, government surveillance, militarized police, neighbors turning in neighbors, privatized prisons, and forced labor camps, to name just a few similarities—is tracking very closely with what happened in Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.
We are walking a dangerous path right now.
No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people.
Despite what is taught in school and the propaganda that is peddled by the media, the 2020 presidential election is not a populist election for a representative. Rather, it’s a gathering of shareholders to select the next CEO, a fact reinforced by the nation’s archaic electoral college system.
Anyone who believes that this election will bring about any real change in how the American government does business is either incredibly naïve, woefully out-of-touch, or oblivious to the fact that as an in-depth Princeton University study shows, we now live in an oligarchy that is “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.”
When a country spends close to $10 billion on elections to select what is, for all intents and purposes, a glorified homecoming king or queen to occupy the White House and fill other government seats, while more than 40 million of its people live in poverty, more than 40 million Americans are on unemployment, more than 500,000 Americans are homeless, and analysts forecast it will take a decade to work our way out of the current COVID-induced recession, that’s a country whose priorities are out of step with the needs of its people.
Be warned, however: the Establishment—the Deep State and its corporate partners that really run the show, pull the strings and dictate the policies, no matter who occupies the Oval Office—is not going to allow anyone to take office who will unravel their power structures. Those who have attempted to do so in the past have been effectively put out of commission.
Voting sustains the illusion that we have a democratic republic, but it is merely a dictatorship in disguise, or what political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately refer to as an “economic élite domination.”
In such an environment, the economic elite (lobbyists, corporations, monied special interest groups) dictate national policy. As the Princeton University oligarchy study indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. As such, the citizenry has little if any impact on the policies of government.
We have been saddled with a two-party system and fooled into believing that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when in fact, the two parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted, both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty
We’re drowning under the weight of too much debt, too many wars, too much power in the hands of a centralized government run by a corporate elite, too many militarized police, too many laws, too many lobbyists, and generally too much bad news.
The powers-that-be want us to believe that our job as citizens begins and ends on Election Day. They want us to believe that we have no right to complain about the state of the nation unless we’ve cast our vote one way or the other. They want us to remain divided over politics, hostile to those with whom we disagree politically, and intolerant of anyone or anything whose solutions to what ails this country differ from our own.
What they don’t want us talking about is the fact that the government is corrupt, the system is rigged, the politicians don’t represent us, the electoral college is a joke, most of the candidates are frauds, and, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we as a nation are repeating the mistakes of history—namely, allowing a totalitarian state to reign over us.
Former concentration camp inmate Hannah Arendt warned against this when she wrote, “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”
As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?
Never forget that the lesser of two evils is still evil.
Thursday, July 9, 2020
SC215-2
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55309.htm
There Seems to be No Cure for Warmongering Syndrome
Nothing alarms defenders of the U.S. foreign policy consensus more than the prospect of American retrenchment after the last thirty years of overexpansion and failed wars.
If there is one unquestioned assumption in conventional foreign policy thinking, it is that retrenchment is undesirable and dangerous and must never be allowed to happen. The hostility to the idea of retrenchment is so strong because it threatens to reduce U.S. ambitions and opportunities for entanglement in other parts of the world, and the defenders of the status quo thrive on both.
H.R. McMaster is the latest in a line of enforcers of Washington’s prevailing orthodoxy to denounce advocates of retrenchment and restraint. In a new essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Retrenchment Syndrome,” the former general and National Security Advisor to Donald Trump takes it upon himself to respond to Stephen Wertheim and others making the case for foreign policy restraint earlier this year. The essay is remarkably stale and replete with hawkish clichés, and his broadsides against those he calls “retrenchment hard-liners” never hit home. McMaster’s case against retrenchment unwittingly demonstrates how sclerotic and bankrupt the dominant view in Washington has become.
Perhaps the most tired argument in McMaster’s essay is the claim that the public’s frustration and dissatisfaction with interminable foreign wars is a “syndrome” that needs to be overcome. The “syndrome” rhetoric has always been a way for hawks to treat legitimate skepticism about unnecessary war as an aberration to be removed. The implication is that constant, desultory warfare in strategically irrelevant parts of the world is healthy and normal and only someone suffering from some sort of psychological or physical malady would disagree. This is as false as it is insulting.
The crux of McMaster’s argument is the false conceit that restraint and inaction are costlier than intervention and endless war: “Retrenchers ignore the fact that the risks and costs of inaction are sometimes higher than those of engagement.” This might be a more compelling objection if this were a fact rather than a hawkish talking point. When we consider the trillions of dollars wasted, thousands of Americans killed and tens of thousands of Americans wounded, plus the hundreds of thousands of other people killed in our recent wars, it is absurd to think that the “costs of inaction” could be higher than that. Consider how many people in Iraq alone might still be alive today had the U.S. not “acted” by invading their country and throwing it into chaos.
In fact, the risks and costs of inaction are always lower in that there aren’t any. Refusing to intervene in another country’s internal conflict poses no risks to the U.S., and it costs the U.S. nothing. By definition, inaction is without cost. Hawks need to make people think that inaction is so costly to make them swallow the high costs of military intervention, but it simply isn’t true. Coming from the same former National Security Advisor who entertained the idea of waging preventive war on North Korea, it is laughable.
He refers to “evidence that U.S. disengagement can make a bad situation worse,” but he doesn’t actually present any evidence. He mentions that Obama did not launch useless airstrikes against the Syrian government in 2013, and contrasts this with the useless airstrikes Trump ordered in 2017 and 2018, but otherwise he doesn’t acknowledge the U.S. was anything but “disengaged” from the conflict. On the contrary, the U.S. was one of many governments funneling weapons into Syria. The U.S. was meddling in Syria practically from the start of the war, and that meddling contributed to making the conflict longer and more intense. McMaster’s account isn’t just misleading. It is so wrong that it turns reality completely upside down.
McMaster faults advocates of retrenchment for their alleged national narcissism: “Their pleas for disengagement are profoundly narcissistic, as they perceive geopolitical actors only in relation to the United States. In their view, other actors—whether friends or foes—possess no aspirations and no agency, except in reaction to U.S. policies and actions.” This is so false that it is almost funny, because one of the main complaints that most advocates of retrenchment have against our current foreign policy is that it frequently ignores or dismisses the interests and agency of other states. We are the ones constantly imploring policymakers to imagine how other governments look at the world in order to understand why they act the way they do. McMaster has a history of faulting others for the very narcissism that he displays.
His attack on restraint serves as a follow-up to the article he wrote on China this spring. In both of these arguments, he abuses the concept of “strategic empathy” to justify the continued pursuit of hegemony. McMaster defines strategic empathy as “an understanding of the ideology, emotions, and aspirations that drive and constrain other actors,” but while he touts the importance of the concept he shows no sign of understanding it. As Jon Askonas says, “Never does McMaster try to get inside the heads of the actual leaders and decision-makers of the countries he is writing about.”
In his earlier article, he projects his own ambitious view of U.S. foreign policy onto the Chinese government. Ethan Paul noted this in his response to McMaster: “In other words, McMaster’s rendition of strategic empathy is, ironically, little more than a manifestation of his inability to escape his own strategic narcissism, to view the world from any other standpoint but his own.”
He does the same thing he accuses retrenchers of doing when he warns about the danger of retrenchment. He assumes that the continued U.S. pursuit of primacy is essential to the security of other regions, and he sees any reduction in U.S. involvement anywhere as an invitation to chaos and aggression by others. But it is because other states have their own agency and act in their own interests that we can be reasonably sure that U.S. retrenchment doesn’t have to lead to the destabilizing and destructive outcomes that McMaster describes. As in all things, the details and the execution would matter greatly, but McMaster doesn’t even want to entertain the possibility that the U.S. can lay down some of its excessive burdens.
McMaster makes a sweeping statement at one point that is hard to take seriously: “American behavior did not cause jihadi terrorism, Chinese economic aggression, Russian political subversion, or the hostility of Iran and North Korea. And U.S. disengagement would not attenuate those challenges or make them easier to overcome.” The role of U.S. policy in driving and exacerbating many of these “challenges” is debatable, and once again McMaster fails the test of strategic empathy when he refuses to understand how U.S. behavior is perceived by others. Even if McMaster were right about the first part, the conclusion does not follow at all.
In some regions, it may be wiser for the U.S. to have a much less prominent role so that our allies and partners can work out more constructive relations with their neighbors. At present the U.S. is an impediment to inter-Korean rapprochement, and that actually makes the peninsula less stable and secure. Given that more than eighteen years of the “war on terror” has greatly increased the number of jihadist terrorist organizations in the world, it is preposterous to think that continuing with more of the same will in any way “attenuate” this threat. A modus vivendi with both Iran and North Korea is possible if the U.S. would be willing to abandon some of its ambitious goals and scale back its military presence. To a great extent, the hostility of these governments is fueled and sustained by their perception of the threat that our military poses to them. In those cases, retrenchment could very well have a stabilizing effect. A smaller U.S. presence in Europe could reduce tensions with Russia and allow for improved relations between Russia and its immediate neighbors. The fact that McMaster rejects all of this out of hand with nothing more than trite slogans and fear-mongering is testament to the weakness of his position.
When Donald Trump was elected, the foreign policy establishment was on alert for any indication that Trump would preside over a period of retrenchment, but they need not have worried. Instead of ending wars and bringing troops home, as he still claims he will, Trump escalated every war he inherited, deployed more troops overseas, and took more aggressive military action than his predecessor in some cases. He picked McMaster to replace Michael Flynn, and then picked John Bolton to replace McMaster. The first three National Security Advisors differed in many ways, but they were all hawks and Trump was mostly simpatico with all of them.
Since he left the White House, McMaster has taken up at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), the notoriously hard-line, anti-Iranian think tank that has had considerable influence in shaping the administration’s failed Iran policy both during McMaster’s tenure and after. If McMaster had his way, U.S. foreign policy would be extremely aggressive in every region, and that is much more likely to produce disastrous conflicts that would sap our strength and bankrupt us.
There Seems to be No Cure for Warmongering Syndrome
Nothing alarms defenders of the U.S. foreign policy consensus more than the prospect of American retrenchment after the last thirty years of overexpansion and failed wars.
If there is one unquestioned assumption in conventional foreign policy thinking, it is that retrenchment is undesirable and dangerous and must never be allowed to happen. The hostility to the idea of retrenchment is so strong because it threatens to reduce U.S. ambitions and opportunities for entanglement in other parts of the world, and the defenders of the status quo thrive on both.
H.R. McMaster is the latest in a line of enforcers of Washington’s prevailing orthodoxy to denounce advocates of retrenchment and restraint. In a new essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Retrenchment Syndrome,” the former general and National Security Advisor to Donald Trump takes it upon himself to respond to Stephen Wertheim and others making the case for foreign policy restraint earlier this year. The essay is remarkably stale and replete with hawkish clichés, and his broadsides against those he calls “retrenchment hard-liners” never hit home. McMaster’s case against retrenchment unwittingly demonstrates how sclerotic and bankrupt the dominant view in Washington has become.
Perhaps the most tired argument in McMaster’s essay is the claim that the public’s frustration and dissatisfaction with interminable foreign wars is a “syndrome” that needs to be overcome. The “syndrome” rhetoric has always been a way for hawks to treat legitimate skepticism about unnecessary war as an aberration to be removed. The implication is that constant, desultory warfare in strategically irrelevant parts of the world is healthy and normal and only someone suffering from some sort of psychological or physical malady would disagree. This is as false as it is insulting.
The crux of McMaster’s argument is the false conceit that restraint and inaction are costlier than intervention and endless war: “Retrenchers ignore the fact that the risks and costs of inaction are sometimes higher than those of engagement.” This might be a more compelling objection if this were a fact rather than a hawkish talking point. When we consider the trillions of dollars wasted, thousands of Americans killed and tens of thousands of Americans wounded, plus the hundreds of thousands of other people killed in our recent wars, it is absurd to think that the “costs of inaction” could be higher than that. Consider how many people in Iraq alone might still be alive today had the U.S. not “acted” by invading their country and throwing it into chaos.
In fact, the risks and costs of inaction are always lower in that there aren’t any. Refusing to intervene in another country’s internal conflict poses no risks to the U.S., and it costs the U.S. nothing. By definition, inaction is without cost. Hawks need to make people think that inaction is so costly to make them swallow the high costs of military intervention, but it simply isn’t true. Coming from the same former National Security Advisor who entertained the idea of waging preventive war on North Korea, it is laughable.
He refers to “evidence that U.S. disengagement can make a bad situation worse,” but he doesn’t actually present any evidence. He mentions that Obama did not launch useless airstrikes against the Syrian government in 2013, and contrasts this with the useless airstrikes Trump ordered in 2017 and 2018, but otherwise he doesn’t acknowledge the U.S. was anything but “disengaged” from the conflict. On the contrary, the U.S. was one of many governments funneling weapons into Syria. The U.S. was meddling in Syria practically from the start of the war, and that meddling contributed to making the conflict longer and more intense. McMaster’s account isn’t just misleading. It is so wrong that it turns reality completely upside down.
McMaster faults advocates of retrenchment for their alleged national narcissism: “Their pleas for disengagement are profoundly narcissistic, as they perceive geopolitical actors only in relation to the United States. In their view, other actors—whether friends or foes—possess no aspirations and no agency, except in reaction to U.S. policies and actions.” This is so false that it is almost funny, because one of the main complaints that most advocates of retrenchment have against our current foreign policy is that it frequently ignores or dismisses the interests and agency of other states. We are the ones constantly imploring policymakers to imagine how other governments look at the world in order to understand why they act the way they do. McMaster has a history of faulting others for the very narcissism that he displays.
His attack on restraint serves as a follow-up to the article he wrote on China this spring. In both of these arguments, he abuses the concept of “strategic empathy” to justify the continued pursuit of hegemony. McMaster defines strategic empathy as “an understanding of the ideology, emotions, and aspirations that drive and constrain other actors,” but while he touts the importance of the concept he shows no sign of understanding it. As Jon Askonas says, “Never does McMaster try to get inside the heads of the actual leaders and decision-makers of the countries he is writing about.”
In his earlier article, he projects his own ambitious view of U.S. foreign policy onto the Chinese government. Ethan Paul noted this in his response to McMaster: “In other words, McMaster’s rendition of strategic empathy is, ironically, little more than a manifestation of his inability to escape his own strategic narcissism, to view the world from any other standpoint but his own.”
He does the same thing he accuses retrenchers of doing when he warns about the danger of retrenchment. He assumes that the continued U.S. pursuit of primacy is essential to the security of other regions, and he sees any reduction in U.S. involvement anywhere as an invitation to chaos and aggression by others. But it is because other states have their own agency and act in their own interests that we can be reasonably sure that U.S. retrenchment doesn’t have to lead to the destabilizing and destructive outcomes that McMaster describes. As in all things, the details and the execution would matter greatly, but McMaster doesn’t even want to entertain the possibility that the U.S. can lay down some of its excessive burdens.
McMaster makes a sweeping statement at one point that is hard to take seriously: “American behavior did not cause jihadi terrorism, Chinese economic aggression, Russian political subversion, or the hostility of Iran and North Korea. And U.S. disengagement would not attenuate those challenges or make them easier to overcome.” The role of U.S. policy in driving and exacerbating many of these “challenges” is debatable, and once again McMaster fails the test of strategic empathy when he refuses to understand how U.S. behavior is perceived by others. Even if McMaster were right about the first part, the conclusion does not follow at all.
In some regions, it may be wiser for the U.S. to have a much less prominent role so that our allies and partners can work out more constructive relations with their neighbors. At present the U.S. is an impediment to inter-Korean rapprochement, and that actually makes the peninsula less stable and secure. Given that more than eighteen years of the “war on terror” has greatly increased the number of jihadist terrorist organizations in the world, it is preposterous to think that continuing with more of the same will in any way “attenuate” this threat. A modus vivendi with both Iran and North Korea is possible if the U.S. would be willing to abandon some of its ambitious goals and scale back its military presence. To a great extent, the hostility of these governments is fueled and sustained by their perception of the threat that our military poses to them. In those cases, retrenchment could very well have a stabilizing effect. A smaller U.S. presence in Europe could reduce tensions with Russia and allow for improved relations between Russia and its immediate neighbors. The fact that McMaster rejects all of this out of hand with nothing more than trite slogans and fear-mongering is testament to the weakness of his position.
When Donald Trump was elected, the foreign policy establishment was on alert for any indication that Trump would preside over a period of retrenchment, but they need not have worried. Instead of ending wars and bringing troops home, as he still claims he will, Trump escalated every war he inherited, deployed more troops overseas, and took more aggressive military action than his predecessor in some cases. He picked McMaster to replace Michael Flynn, and then picked John Bolton to replace McMaster. The first three National Security Advisors differed in many ways, but they were all hawks and Trump was mostly simpatico with all of them.
Since he left the White House, McMaster has taken up at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), the notoriously hard-line, anti-Iranian think tank that has had considerable influence in shaping the administration’s failed Iran policy both during McMaster’s tenure and after. If McMaster had his way, U.S. foreign policy would be extremely aggressive in every region, and that is much more likely to produce disastrous conflicts that would sap our strength and bankrupt us.
Wednesday, July 8, 2020
SC215-1
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly20/economy-3-words7-20.html
The American Economy in Four Words: Neofeudal Extortion, Decline, Collapse
Now that the pandemic is over and the economy is roaring again--so the stock market says--we're heading straight back up into the good old days of 2019. Nothing to worry about, we've recovered the trajectory of higher and higher, better every day in every way.
Everything's great except the fatal rot at the heart of the U.S. economy hasn't even been acknowledged, much less addressed: every sector of the economy is nothing but one form of neofeudal extortion or another.
Let's spin the time machine back to the late Middle Ages, at the height of feudalism, and imagine we're trying to get a boatload of goods to the nearest city to sell. As we drift down the river, we're constantly being stopped and charged a fee for transiting one small fiefdom after another. When we finally reach the city, there's an entry fee for bringing our goods to market.
Note that none of these fees were payments for improvements to transport or for services rendered; they were simply extortion. This was the economic structure of feudalism: petty fiefdoms levied extortionate fees that funded the lifestyles of nobility.
This is why I have long called America's economy neofeudal: we pay ever higher fees for services that are degrading, not improving. This is the essence of extortion: we don't get any improvement in goods and services for the extra money we're forced to pay.
Consider higher education: costs are soaring while the value of the "product"--a college diploma--declines. What extra value are students receiving for the doubling of tuition and fees? The short answer is "none." College diplomas are in over-supply, and studies have found that a majority of students learn remarkably little of value in college.
As I explain in my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy, the solution is to accredit the student, not the institution. If the student learned very little, he/she doesn't get credentialed.
Were students to have access to the best classroom lectures online (nearly free), and on-the-job apprenticeships in the workplace, (nearly free or perhaps even paid), learning would be significantly improved and costs reduced by 80% to 90%.
In this structure, there's no need for costly campuses or administration; the entire structure of higher education could be largely automated with software, except for the workplace apprenticeships which focus on case studies and real-world projects that are creating value in the here and now.
Consider healthcare: has the quality of healthcare doubled along with costs? Are Americans significantly healthier as the costs of healthcare have tripled? The aggregate health of Americans has arguably declined, while the stresses placed on frontline care providers by the ever-heavier burdens of compliance and paperwork have increased.
What about the $200 hammers and $300 million F-35 aircraft of the defense industry? Once again, as costs have soared, the quality and effectiveness of the products being supplied has arguable declined.
How about state and local government services? Are they improving as taxes and junk fees rise? Once again, government services are often declining in quality as taxes and fees increase by leaps and bounds.
In sector after sector, the quality of the goods and services has declined while costs have soared. This is the acme of neofeudalism: insiders and the New Nobility are skimming fortunes as prices skyrocket and the quality of the goods and services provided plummet.
Look at the cost increases in higher education, healthcare and childcare and ask yourself if the quality of those services have risen in lockstep with price increases.
This is nothing but neofeudal extortion. The cartels raise prices and we're forced to pay them, just as feudal commoners were forced to pay.
But extortion isn't the only feature of neofeudalism that is leading to collapse. Just as important is the slow erosion of commoners' self-rule and ownership of meaningful, productive capital.
This dynamic is explored in depth in The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000.
This gradual, almost imperceptible erosion is the essence of neofeudalism, a process of transferring political and economic power from commoners to a new Financial Aristocracy/Nobility.
If we examine the "wealth" of the middle class/working class (however you define them, the defining characteristic of both is the reliance on labor for income, as opposed to living off the income earned by capital), we find the primary capital asset is the family home, which as I have explained many times, is unproductive--in essence, a form of consumption rather than a source of income.
In a globalized, financialized economy, the only capital worth owning is mobile capital, capital that can be shifted by a keystroke to avoid devaluation or earn a a higher return.
Housing and pensions are "stranded capital," forms of capital that are not mobile unless they are liquidated before crises or expropriations occur.
I am also struck by the ever-rising barriers to starting or even operating small businesses, a core form of capital, as enterprises generate income and (potentially) capital gains. (The pandemic has only increased barriers that were already high.)
The capital and managerial expertise required to launch and grow a legal enterprise is significant, which is at least partly why a nation of self-employed farmers, shopkeepers, artisans and traders is now a nation of employees of government and large corporations.
What sort of capital can be acquired by the average commoner now? Enough to match the wealth and political power of financial Nobility?
As for political influence: a recent study found that voters had very little power in the U.S., which is effectively an oligarchy: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.
Summary: "The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern universities has concluded."
Neofeudalism is not a re-run of feudalism. It's a new and improved, state-corporate version of indentured servitude. The process of devolving to feudalism required the erosion of peasants' rights to own productive assets, which in an agrarian economy meant ownership of land.
Ownership of land was replaced with various obligations to the local feudal lord or monastery-- free labor for time periods ranging from a few days to months; a share of one's grain harvest, and so on.
The other key dynamic of feudalism was the removal of the peasantry from the public sphere. In the pre-feudal era (for example, the reign of Charlemagne), peasants could still attend public councils and make their voices heard, and there was a rough system of justice in which peasants could petition authorities for redress.
From the capitalist perspective, feudalism restricted serfs' access to cash markets where they could sell their labor or harvests. The key feature of capitalism isn't just markets-- it's unrestricted ownership of productive assets--land, tools, workshops, and the social capital of skills, networks, trading associations, guilds, etc.
Our system is Neofeudal because the non-elites have no real voice in the public sphere, and ownership of productive capital is indirectly suppressed by the state-corporate duopoly.
Our society has a legal structure of self-rule and ownership of capital, but in reality it is a Neofeudal Oligarchy. The decline is visible, and so is the trajectory to collapse.
The American Economy in Four Words: Neofeudal Extortion, Decline, Collapse
Now that the pandemic is over and the economy is roaring again--so the stock market says--we're heading straight back up into the good old days of 2019. Nothing to worry about, we've recovered the trajectory of higher and higher, better every day in every way.
Everything's great except the fatal rot at the heart of the U.S. economy hasn't even been acknowledged, much less addressed: every sector of the economy is nothing but one form of neofeudal extortion or another.
Let's spin the time machine back to the late Middle Ages, at the height of feudalism, and imagine we're trying to get a boatload of goods to the nearest city to sell. As we drift down the river, we're constantly being stopped and charged a fee for transiting one small fiefdom after another. When we finally reach the city, there's an entry fee for bringing our goods to market.
Note that none of these fees were payments for improvements to transport or for services rendered; they were simply extortion. This was the economic structure of feudalism: petty fiefdoms levied extortionate fees that funded the lifestyles of nobility.
This is why I have long called America's economy neofeudal: we pay ever higher fees for services that are degrading, not improving. This is the essence of extortion: we don't get any improvement in goods and services for the extra money we're forced to pay.
Consider higher education: costs are soaring while the value of the "product"--a college diploma--declines. What extra value are students receiving for the doubling of tuition and fees? The short answer is "none." College diplomas are in over-supply, and studies have found that a majority of students learn remarkably little of value in college.
As I explain in my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy, the solution is to accredit the student, not the institution. If the student learned very little, he/she doesn't get credentialed.
Were students to have access to the best classroom lectures online (nearly free), and on-the-job apprenticeships in the workplace, (nearly free or perhaps even paid), learning would be significantly improved and costs reduced by 80% to 90%.
In this structure, there's no need for costly campuses or administration; the entire structure of higher education could be largely automated with software, except for the workplace apprenticeships which focus on case studies and real-world projects that are creating value in the here and now.
Consider healthcare: has the quality of healthcare doubled along with costs? Are Americans significantly healthier as the costs of healthcare have tripled? The aggregate health of Americans has arguably declined, while the stresses placed on frontline care providers by the ever-heavier burdens of compliance and paperwork have increased.
What about the $200 hammers and $300 million F-35 aircraft of the defense industry? Once again, as costs have soared, the quality and effectiveness of the products being supplied has arguable declined.
How about state and local government services? Are they improving as taxes and junk fees rise? Once again, government services are often declining in quality as taxes and fees increase by leaps and bounds.
In sector after sector, the quality of the goods and services has declined while costs have soared. This is the acme of neofeudalism: insiders and the New Nobility are skimming fortunes as prices skyrocket and the quality of the goods and services provided plummet.
Look at the cost increases in higher education, healthcare and childcare and ask yourself if the quality of those services have risen in lockstep with price increases.
This is nothing but neofeudal extortion. The cartels raise prices and we're forced to pay them, just as feudal commoners were forced to pay.
But extortion isn't the only feature of neofeudalism that is leading to collapse. Just as important is the slow erosion of commoners' self-rule and ownership of meaningful, productive capital.
This dynamic is explored in depth in The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000.
This gradual, almost imperceptible erosion is the essence of neofeudalism, a process of transferring political and economic power from commoners to a new Financial Aristocracy/Nobility.
If we examine the "wealth" of the middle class/working class (however you define them, the defining characteristic of both is the reliance on labor for income, as opposed to living off the income earned by capital), we find the primary capital asset is the family home, which as I have explained many times, is unproductive--in essence, a form of consumption rather than a source of income.
In a globalized, financialized economy, the only capital worth owning is mobile capital, capital that can be shifted by a keystroke to avoid devaluation or earn a a higher return.
Housing and pensions are "stranded capital," forms of capital that are not mobile unless they are liquidated before crises or expropriations occur.
I am also struck by the ever-rising barriers to starting or even operating small businesses, a core form of capital, as enterprises generate income and (potentially) capital gains. (The pandemic has only increased barriers that were already high.)
The capital and managerial expertise required to launch and grow a legal enterprise is significant, which is at least partly why a nation of self-employed farmers, shopkeepers, artisans and traders is now a nation of employees of government and large corporations.
What sort of capital can be acquired by the average commoner now? Enough to match the wealth and political power of financial Nobility?
As for political influence: a recent study found that voters had very little power in the U.S., which is effectively an oligarchy: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.
Summary: "The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern universities has concluded."
Neofeudalism is not a re-run of feudalism. It's a new and improved, state-corporate version of indentured servitude. The process of devolving to feudalism required the erosion of peasants' rights to own productive assets, which in an agrarian economy meant ownership of land.
Ownership of land was replaced with various obligations to the local feudal lord or monastery-- free labor for time periods ranging from a few days to months; a share of one's grain harvest, and so on.
The other key dynamic of feudalism was the removal of the peasantry from the public sphere. In the pre-feudal era (for example, the reign of Charlemagne), peasants could still attend public councils and make their voices heard, and there was a rough system of justice in which peasants could petition authorities for redress.
From the capitalist perspective, feudalism restricted serfs' access to cash markets where they could sell their labor or harvests. The key feature of capitalism isn't just markets-- it's unrestricted ownership of productive assets--land, tools, workshops, and the social capital of skills, networks, trading associations, guilds, etc.
Our system is Neofeudal because the non-elites have no real voice in the public sphere, and ownership of productive capital is indirectly suppressed by the state-corporate duopoly.
Our society has a legal structure of self-rule and ownership of capital, but in reality it is a Neofeudal Oligarchy. The decline is visible, and so is the trajectory to collapse.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
