http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51915.htm
Idiots Driving World to War
Like a person going up in an escalator while asserting they are going down, the British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt has a bizarre way of trying to assure Iran that war is not on the cards.
Hunt, who is vying to become Britain’s new prime minister, stated on camera that “he wants to de-escalate” the danger of a military confrontation with Iran over mounting tensions in the Persian Gulf.
That was only days after he vowed to dramatically increase Britain’s military spending and in particular, boost the country’s naval firepower – citing Iran as the main threat to British commercial shipping interests.
It also follows news that London has ordered a second warship to patrol the Persian Gulf. Earlier this week a British Royal Navy frigate reportedly challenged Iranian military vessels (three small boats) after they allegedly tried to impede a British oil tanker entering the narrow Strait of Hormuz. Iran vehemently denied any such interference by its boats and claimed that Britain and the US were engaging in a provocation.
Given that the Pentagon has announced plans to send an international coalition of warships to the Gulf “over the next two weeks”, under the guise of protecting commercial shipping from alleged Iranian threats, it must certainly look to Iran like the “war escalator” is speeding upwards.
Hunt has previously asserted that British forces would join in any American military attack on Iran. The resonance of past Anglo-American skullduggery against Iran is no doubt palpable to most Iranians.
There seems little doubt that Hunt is playing the “hard military man” card in his grubby contest with Boris Johnson to become the next prime minister. Conservative Party members are due to vote later this month on who is to replace the hapless Theresa May.
Bumbling Boris is the favourite to win the party race. But Hunt is making a last-gasp bid to rally the rank-and-file with seeming credentials of being a “tough leader”.
This week he wrote in a newspaper oped: “As the son of a naval officer, I know a little of the sacrifices of these individuals and of their families back home.”
He then promised that, if elected prime minister, he would ramp up military spending by 25 per cent, or by £15 billion, over the next five years. He claimed the tensions in the Gulf with Iran are “proof” that Britain needs to overhaul its maritime forces.
That exorbitant indulgence of military spending will likely wreak havoc on public services and prolong years of economic austerity on ordinary Britons. But such is the ambition of Hunt to get into 10 Downing Street, it’s a devastating price he seems willing to make British citizens pay.
However, more damning is Hunt’s reckless gamble from inflaming tensions with Iran. Sending more naval forces to the Gulf at a time of knife-edge fears about a war breaking out is ludicrous, if not criminally irresponsible.
Over the past two months, there have already been numerous incidents of alleged sabotage on shipping in the strategically important Gulf which the US has blamed on Iran. An American spy drone was shot down on June 20 by the Iranians after it allegedly violated Iran’s airspace. That incident nearly resulted in, reportedly, Trump ordering airstrikes.
The seizure last week by British commandoes of an Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar has added to fraught nerves in the region. More so because Tehran contends that seizure to be an illegal “act of piracy” orchestrated by Washington and London. The refusal by Britain to release the cargo of two million barrels of oil – based on dubious claims of enforcing EU sanctions against Syria – would also seem to be a calculated insult to provoke Iran.
From Iran’s point of view, the British are permitted to hijack oil ships, but whenever its patrol boats even as much as approach a British tanker near its territorial waters, then London and Washington are crying “foul”. The flagrant hypocrisy is in itself another provocative goading.
Let’s be clear: the Buffoonish Boris Johnson would be equally as deplorable as the Silly Hunt. Both of them are unscrupulous sycophants to America’s President Trump and his crazed warmongering towards Iran.
Russia has warned that the escalating tensions in the Gulf could spark a catastrophic war. Potentially a war in the tinderbox region could lead to World War III.
Lamentably, Britain’s shambolic politics and its venal politicians are playing with fire in their pathetic plans for personal self-aggrandizement of power.
Hunt’s double-think posturing of “escalating to de-escalate” is a sure sign that this Tory toff should not be heading to Downing Street, but rather to a padded cell. Johnson could also qualify for a cell next door.
The backdrop to resolving the current madness for endangering global peace seems blindingly obvious. Washington needs to abide by the 2015 international nuclear treaty with Iran, lift the sanctions crushing the Iranian economy, and remove all warships from the Persian Gulf.
As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said this week, there would be no need for the US or Britain to “protect shipping” in the Gulf if these two states simply respected international law and norms of diplomacy.
It is insane and gut-wrenchingly tragic that world peace is being jeopardized by idiots like Hunt, Johnson and their puppet master in Washington. The only long-term solution is for the whole rotten political class in Britain, and the US, to be thrown out by popular revolt.
Friday, July 19, 2019
Thursday, July 18, 2019
SC193-6
http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/2019/07/14/this-week-in-doom-july-14-2019/
This Week In Doom
There is a steady drumbeat of madness in the air… or it is simply my pulse in my ears? It grows louder. It screams of inevitability. When I was a little boy, four or five, I distinctly recall wondering whether mine might not be the last generation to live until "the end of the world." A singular thought for a child– but this was the age of fallout shelters and under-the-desk nuclear attack drills– all of it kabuki, but calculated to help you feel you were doing something. Lately I've had those thoughts again, unbidden after sixty years. A fear, leading up to a Third, and final, world war as pieces float into place.
A nuclear tipped empire led by a madman drunk on vanity, enabled by a vocal, hate-brimmed minority intent on nothing so much as making Those People suffer. "Those people" mean the right people in their view– immigrants, democrats, liberals, academics, knowledge-workers, African-americans, Latinos, queers– anyone not likely to be found in a Prosperity Gospel megachurch, a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, or a Trump Klux Klan meeting. These people have always been with us. In his satirical 1922 novel about American culture, Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis observed the vacuity of middle-class life and the social pressure toward conformity in a midwestern town. To remember that a quarter of our neighbors are nazis-in-waiting, never forget that as Nixon boarded the helicopter to his ride to shame and infamy, he stood at 24 per cent approval, per Gallup.
Our media reinforces that conformity, even though we are all repeatedly told what special snowflakes we are. Corporate media holds the coat for the military-industrial complex as we push for war. All is propaganda, to "support the troops;" special camo-version uniform accents for major league sports teams; Blue Angels overflights. Relentless propaganda against the new enemy, which this month has been Iran. Unlike the Cold War that informed my childhood, our world is no longer kept “stable” through a bipolar death grip of mutually assured destruction. The mood these days seems to evoke the period prior to WWI, where no one knows how shifting diplomatic alliances will fall, when the competition was between nation states and competing economic orders rather than ideologies. Prior to WWI, the global hegemon/empire was Britain, which after being bled white by two World Wars found the costs of Empire unsupportable. The US assumed the mortgage, and in the fullness of time, we too will assume that Whiter Shade of Pale. In the runup to WWI, the unstable nutcase in the equation was Kaiser Wilhelm. In our case, the loose orange cannon has 24-7 access to our nuclear codes and a troubled path to re-election.
The fact is that our modern system is dependent upon petroleum, and will be for the foreseeable future. Our lives, society and economies are based on oil and petroleum byproducts. The plastics, the supply chains that take the raw ingredients from manufacturing to retail are all dependent on petroleum and byproducts. Whether we can generate enough renewable power to replace a significangt portion. of this is arguable. . Decision makers have always known this.
We knew the potential impacts of global warming 40 years ago. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House; Reagan had them removed, and declared, "Morning in America." Weaning a society and a world from petroleum might have been difficult enough had we summoned the will; but with the Reaganauts in charge such change was off the boards.
Today, production webs are now globally interlocked. The rise of developing nations like China and India and the Pacific Rim means that their citizens want a car in the driveway and steak on their plate just like the first world imperialists that stole their assets 100 years ago. Any attempts for the West to move to a zero emission scheme would have been rendered moot if the Third World refused to go along. Forego growth? Not likely.
So knowing this, the elites have chosen to deny climate change for as long as possible to a public too complacent to notice or make changes themselves. Once a general alarm was sounded and a tipping point of public opinion was close, they would pay lip service to environmentalism. Enter some toothless carbon-cutting deals without enforcement mechanisms, and with an action date near mid-century. Anything to keep people placated and assuming that their Governments were actually working the issue.
Use the notion of the free market meeting the problem head on once there is enough profit involved. By the time this might be viable, it'll be far too late to head off the four degrees Celsius increase, the tipping point towards full blown environmental Armageddon.
Meanwhile, TPTB maximize short term profit, and use that profit to start socially engineering the lower energy footprint, ownership-free world that the New World Order will demand. And rathole money in land, bunkers and other assets to make sure they and their progeny are prepared to survive a couple years of zombie unpleasantness, then emerge with prerogatives intact.
The exacerbated income inequality demonstrated above is just more evidence that TPTB are concentrating the wealth. It's a game we're not even aware is being played, because we're so complacent. By the time the jig is up, they will already field their own private armies in order to keep themselves and their families safe from a very pissed off population.
Two degrees rise is almost certainly baked in at this point, and because the world economic system is reliant on petroleum, there's no changing its current direction absent a worldwide commitment, the consensus for which is notably absent. And this does not account for other hidden feed back loops within the Earth's biosphere, such as frozen methane reserves in the Arctic.
When I was young, the earth was home to 3.7 billion people. Now, 8+ billion people will all want desperately to survive what is coming. The kind of climate migrations we'll be facing will almost certainly mean nations will go to war over dwindling supplies, sources of fresh, clean water foremost among them. Look to the news out of India this week, then consider what the disappearance of glaciers will mean for the great, glacier-fed rivers of Asia. We know what the end game is, and we've known, or been able to deduce, for forty years. Nothing has changed except that time grows shorter. And I still wonder whether my generation will be the last to walk the earth as we knew it.
This Week In Doom
There is a steady drumbeat of madness in the air… or it is simply my pulse in my ears? It grows louder. It screams of inevitability. When I was a little boy, four or five, I distinctly recall wondering whether mine might not be the last generation to live until "the end of the world." A singular thought for a child– but this was the age of fallout shelters and under-the-desk nuclear attack drills– all of it kabuki, but calculated to help you feel you were doing something. Lately I've had those thoughts again, unbidden after sixty years. A fear, leading up to a Third, and final, world war as pieces float into place.
A nuclear tipped empire led by a madman drunk on vanity, enabled by a vocal, hate-brimmed minority intent on nothing so much as making Those People suffer. "Those people" mean the right people in their view– immigrants, democrats, liberals, academics, knowledge-workers, African-americans, Latinos, queers– anyone not likely to be found in a Prosperity Gospel megachurch, a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, or a Trump Klux Klan meeting. These people have always been with us. In his satirical 1922 novel about American culture, Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis observed the vacuity of middle-class life and the social pressure toward conformity in a midwestern town. To remember that a quarter of our neighbors are nazis-in-waiting, never forget that as Nixon boarded the helicopter to his ride to shame and infamy, he stood at 24 per cent approval, per Gallup.
Our media reinforces that conformity, even though we are all repeatedly told what special snowflakes we are. Corporate media holds the coat for the military-industrial complex as we push for war. All is propaganda, to "support the troops;" special camo-version uniform accents for major league sports teams; Blue Angels overflights. Relentless propaganda against the new enemy, which this month has been Iran. Unlike the Cold War that informed my childhood, our world is no longer kept “stable” through a bipolar death grip of mutually assured destruction. The mood these days seems to evoke the period prior to WWI, where no one knows how shifting diplomatic alliances will fall, when the competition was between nation states and competing economic orders rather than ideologies. Prior to WWI, the global hegemon/empire was Britain, which after being bled white by two World Wars found the costs of Empire unsupportable. The US assumed the mortgage, and in the fullness of time, we too will assume that Whiter Shade of Pale. In the runup to WWI, the unstable nutcase in the equation was Kaiser Wilhelm. In our case, the loose orange cannon has 24-7 access to our nuclear codes and a troubled path to re-election.
The fact is that our modern system is dependent upon petroleum, and will be for the foreseeable future. Our lives, society and economies are based on oil and petroleum byproducts. The plastics, the supply chains that take the raw ingredients from manufacturing to retail are all dependent on petroleum and byproducts. Whether we can generate enough renewable power to replace a significangt portion. of this is arguable. . Decision makers have always known this.
We knew the potential impacts of global warming 40 years ago. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House; Reagan had them removed, and declared, "Morning in America." Weaning a society and a world from petroleum might have been difficult enough had we summoned the will; but with the Reaganauts in charge such change was off the boards.
Today, production webs are now globally interlocked. The rise of developing nations like China and India and the Pacific Rim means that their citizens want a car in the driveway and steak on their plate just like the first world imperialists that stole their assets 100 years ago. Any attempts for the West to move to a zero emission scheme would have been rendered moot if the Third World refused to go along. Forego growth? Not likely.
So knowing this, the elites have chosen to deny climate change for as long as possible to a public too complacent to notice or make changes themselves. Once a general alarm was sounded and a tipping point of public opinion was close, they would pay lip service to environmentalism. Enter some toothless carbon-cutting deals without enforcement mechanisms, and with an action date near mid-century. Anything to keep people placated and assuming that their Governments were actually working the issue.
Use the notion of the free market meeting the problem head on once there is enough profit involved. By the time this might be viable, it'll be far too late to head off the four degrees Celsius increase, the tipping point towards full blown environmental Armageddon.
Meanwhile, TPTB maximize short term profit, and use that profit to start socially engineering the lower energy footprint, ownership-free world that the New World Order will demand. And rathole money in land, bunkers and other assets to make sure they and their progeny are prepared to survive a couple years of zombie unpleasantness, then emerge with prerogatives intact.
The exacerbated income inequality demonstrated above is just more evidence that TPTB are concentrating the wealth. It's a game we're not even aware is being played, because we're so complacent. By the time the jig is up, they will already field their own private armies in order to keep themselves and their families safe from a very pissed off population.
Two degrees rise is almost certainly baked in at this point, and because the world economic system is reliant on petroleum, there's no changing its current direction absent a worldwide commitment, the consensus for which is notably absent. And this does not account for other hidden feed back loops within the Earth's biosphere, such as frozen methane reserves in the Arctic.
When I was young, the earth was home to 3.7 billion people. Now, 8+ billion people will all want desperately to survive what is coming. The kind of climate migrations we'll be facing will almost certainly mean nations will go to war over dwindling supplies, sources of fresh, clean water foremost among them. Look to the news out of India this week, then consider what the disappearance of glaciers will mean for the great, glacier-fed rivers of Asia. We know what the end game is, and we've known, or been able to deduce, for forty years. Nothing has changed except that time grows shorter. And I still wonder whether my generation will be the last to walk the earth as we knew it.
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
SC193-5
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/mainstream-centrists-pose-the-greatest-ideological-threat-to-us-all-96f31b2a1bf7
Mainstream “Centrists” Pose The Greatest Ideological Threat To Us All
Ashton Kutcher, a stupid person who got famous playing the role of a stupid person, tweeted the following the other day:
“Where has the middle gone? Middle class? Politicians who don’t need to be far left or far right? Media the just tells the facts w/o spin? The middle is most! The middle can innovate. The middle can negotiate. Hardworkers with inclusive values = the middle.”
A year ago Kutcher also tweeted a photo of himself sipping from a coffee mug bearing the insignia of the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency, with the caption, “Just sending out a morning shout to the men and woman of the intelligence community that keep us safe and protect our country.”
If Kutcher had tweeted a “far left” or “far right” perspective, like that America should be an all-white ethnostate or that racist demonstrators should be physically assaulted in the streets, it would have made international headlines. But tweeting in favor of the CIA, who kill many orders of magnitude more people than America’s fringe white supremacist groups, went almost completely unnoticed.
This will sound normal and obvious to you. But it shouldn’t.
If people could wake up one morning and suddenly see what the ruling power establishment is doing to them every single day, there’d suddenly be vastly more outrage directed at the so-called “centrists”, and a lot less focus on politically impotent fringe organization like white nationalists and Antifa. This is not to say that all fringe ideologies are harmless, just that none of them pose anywhere near the immediate existential threat that is posed by the current order.
There’s an old joke: A duck swims past two fish and calls down, “Hey fellas! How’s the water?” The fish look at each other for a minute and then one of them asks, “What the hell is water?”
People don’t see the dangers of mainstream “centrism” for the same reason fish don’t see water. In reality, the only reason such an ideology gets labeled “centrism” at all is because it has been normalized and made mainstream by generations of plutocratic media propaganda. The ideological group which supports the status quo omnicidal, ecocidal oppression machine by giving you a choice between two warmongering oligarchic parties in fake elections that never make any difference is nowhere near a politically moderate position by any stretch of the imagination.
People like Ashton Kutcher imagine that the so-called “center” is called that because it sits smack dab in the middle of the ideological spectrum between communism and fascism, right in that moderate sweet spot that respects capitalism and private ownership without flying off the deep end into Nazi-like tyranny. In reality, the status quo exists entirely outside any left-right paradigm. It’s neither “left” nor “right” to give total control of the western world to an alliance of plutocrats and opaque government agencies who seek to expand their power and wealth by destroying our ecosystem, waging endless wars, and gradually shoring up more and more control of their citizenry via internet censorship, surveillance and police militarization. It’s just crazy.
I’m picking on Ashton not because he occupies some special place in all this, but because he doesn’t. He’s just an illustration of how blind people have become to the real threat that’s right in front of them, and how normalized insanity has become.
People who identify as “left” see the ruling power establishment as right-wing, people who identify as “right” see the ruling power establishment as left-wing, and people who identify as “center” see themselves as moderates whose normal, healthy way of life is under threat by the “far right” and “far left”. But really all that’s happening is a few assholes fucking over everyone else, which is no more “left” or “right” than a terrorist attack. The left versus right argument doesn’t even make sense until this far more pressing issue has been resolved. A Bernie supporter and a Trump supporter are arguing about left versus right while trapped in a room with a tiger who’s eating them both alive.
A movement towards true health will look like everyone waking up to the reality that we’re all being driven toward extinction via climate collapse or nuclear war by a ruling class who used propaganda to trick us into thinking that its suicidal trajectory was the moderate path....
Mainstream “Centrists” Pose The Greatest Ideological Threat To Us All
Ashton Kutcher, a stupid person who got famous playing the role of a stupid person, tweeted the following the other day:
“Where has the middle gone? Middle class? Politicians who don’t need to be far left or far right? Media the just tells the facts w/o spin? The middle is most! The middle can innovate. The middle can negotiate. Hardworkers with inclusive values = the middle.”
A year ago Kutcher also tweeted a photo of himself sipping from a coffee mug bearing the insignia of the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency, with the caption, “Just sending out a morning shout to the men and woman of the intelligence community that keep us safe and protect our country.”
If Kutcher had tweeted a “far left” or “far right” perspective, like that America should be an all-white ethnostate or that racist demonstrators should be physically assaulted in the streets, it would have made international headlines. But tweeting in favor of the CIA, who kill many orders of magnitude more people than America’s fringe white supremacist groups, went almost completely unnoticed.
This will sound normal and obvious to you. But it shouldn’t.
If people could wake up one morning and suddenly see what the ruling power establishment is doing to them every single day, there’d suddenly be vastly more outrage directed at the so-called “centrists”, and a lot less focus on politically impotent fringe organization like white nationalists and Antifa. This is not to say that all fringe ideologies are harmless, just that none of them pose anywhere near the immediate existential threat that is posed by the current order.
There’s an old joke: A duck swims past two fish and calls down, “Hey fellas! How’s the water?” The fish look at each other for a minute and then one of them asks, “What the hell is water?”
People don’t see the dangers of mainstream “centrism” for the same reason fish don’t see water. In reality, the only reason such an ideology gets labeled “centrism” at all is because it has been normalized and made mainstream by generations of plutocratic media propaganda. The ideological group which supports the status quo omnicidal, ecocidal oppression machine by giving you a choice between two warmongering oligarchic parties in fake elections that never make any difference is nowhere near a politically moderate position by any stretch of the imagination.
People like Ashton Kutcher imagine that the so-called “center” is called that because it sits smack dab in the middle of the ideological spectrum between communism and fascism, right in that moderate sweet spot that respects capitalism and private ownership without flying off the deep end into Nazi-like tyranny. In reality, the status quo exists entirely outside any left-right paradigm. It’s neither “left” nor “right” to give total control of the western world to an alliance of plutocrats and opaque government agencies who seek to expand their power and wealth by destroying our ecosystem, waging endless wars, and gradually shoring up more and more control of their citizenry via internet censorship, surveillance and police militarization. It’s just crazy.
I’m picking on Ashton not because he occupies some special place in all this, but because he doesn’t. He’s just an illustration of how blind people have become to the real threat that’s right in front of them, and how normalized insanity has become.
People who identify as “left” see the ruling power establishment as right-wing, people who identify as “right” see the ruling power establishment as left-wing, and people who identify as “center” see themselves as moderates whose normal, healthy way of life is under threat by the “far right” and “far left”. But really all that’s happening is a few assholes fucking over everyone else, which is no more “left” or “right” than a terrorist attack. The left versus right argument doesn’t even make sense until this far more pressing issue has been resolved. A Bernie supporter and a Trump supporter are arguing about left versus right while trapped in a room with a tiger who’s eating them both alive.
A movement towards true health will look like everyone waking up to the reality that we’re all being driven toward extinction via climate collapse or nuclear war by a ruling class who used propaganda to trick us into thinking that its suicidal trajectory was the moderate path....
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
SC193-4
https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-anti-migrant-arguments-e-u-u-s-pure-hypocrisy/5683482
Why Are Anti-Migrant Arguments in the E.U., U.S. Pure Hypocrisy?
Almost every day we read about the latest outbursts in Europe, targeting pro-immigration policies. There are protests, even riots. Right-wing governments get voted in, allegedly, because the Europeans “have had enough of relaxed immigration regulations”.
That is what we are told. That’s what we are supposed to understand, and even sympathize with. Anti-immigration sentiments are even pitched to the world as something synonymous with the desire of Europeans “to gain independence from Brussels and the elites”. The right-wing, often racist, spoiled and selfish proletariat is portrayed by many as a long-suffering, hard-working group of people, with progressive aspirations.
If seen from a distance, such arguments are outrageous and even insulting; at least to the billions of those who have already lost their lives, throughout history; victims of the European and North American expansionist genocides. And to those individuals who have, until this day, had their motherlands ruined, livelihoods destroyed, political will violated, and in the end, free and unconditional entry denied; entry into those very countries that keep violating all international laws, while spreading terror and devastation to virtually all corners of the world.
*
In this essay, let us be as concrete as possible. Let us be brief.
I declare from the start, that every African person, every Asian, every citizen of the Middle East and every Latin American (how perverse this very name “Latin” and “America” is, anyway) should be able to freely enter both Europe and North America. Furthermore, he or she should be then allowed to stay for as long as desired, enjoying the free benefits and all those goodies that are being relished by Westerners.
To back this statement, here are several (but not all) basic moral and logical arguments:
First of all, Europe and North America do not belong to their people. They belong to the people from all corners of the globe. In order to build the so-called West, close to one billion (cumulatively, according to my friends, the UN statisticians) had to die, throughout modern and the not so modern history. Virtually everything, from theatres, schools, hospitals, parks, railroads, factories and museums, have been built, literally, on the bones and blood of the conquered peoples. And nothing much has really changed, to these days. Europe and later North America invaded almost the entire planet; they looted, killed, enslaved and tortured. They robbed the world of everything, and gave back nothing, except religion and a servile and toxic bunch of ‘elites’, who are continuously plundering their countries, on behalf of the West. Therefore, Europe and North America were built on credit, and now this credit is due.
Secondly, the Western culture, without any competition, is the most violent civilization on earth. I repeat, without any competition. It cannot be defeated militarily, without further losses; losses which could be easily counted in billions of human lives. Therefore, the only possibility of how to reduce the scale of further global tragedies, is to ‘dilute’ the West and its fundamentalist culture of racial and cultural superiority. The fact that Westerners are now in minority in such cities like London or New York, has not fully stop the U.K. and U.S.A. from committing monstrous crimes, attacking and pillaging foreign countries. But were Europe and North America still homogeneous, there would hardly be any free, independent country left anywhere in the world. Migration to the West is helping, at least to some extent, to save the world. Migrants, from the first and oldest generations, demand that the voices of non-westerners, would be listened to, at least some extent.
Furthermore, and this is of a course well-known argument: the only reason why people from previously wealthy countries like Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Iran or Syria are forced to emigrate, is because their nations were either bombed back to the Stone Age, or destroyed through sadistic sanctions. Why? So, there would be change of the government, and instead of local citizens, the profits from natural resources would benefit Western corporations. Also, of course, in order to prevent the “Domino Effect”. The West hates the idea of the “Domino Effect”: read, the regional or global influence of Communist, socialist or progressive governments which would be determined to improve the lives of their people. West needs obedient, frightened slaves, not great heroes and bright thinkers! To stop the “Domino Effect”, millions had to die in the 1965 coup in Indonesia, in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, to name just a few unfortunate nations. If you come to a rich, socially-balanced nation, rob it of everything, overthrow its government, and reduce it to a ‘failed state’, in order for your own nation and people to prosper, would you be shocked if some of its people were to decide to try to follow the resources that you have stolen; meaning, moving to your own country?
The reason why people in the West do not follow this train of logic is simply because they are thoroughly ignorant; trying extremely hard, for decades and centuries, to remain blind. If they claim ignorance, they don’t have to act. They can just enjoy the loot, without paying the price. It is simple, isn’t it?
*
Are those right-wing voters in the U.K., in Hungary, in Greece, France and Italy, as well as in other EU countries, really so blind, or so morally corrupt, that they do not see the reality?
Do they expect to have a ‘free ride’ for another century or two?
Do they teach history in European schools? I wonder. And if they do, what kind of history? I was shocked to realize that even some of my Spanish friends who are working for the United Nations, have absolutely no clue about the barbarity their country had committed in Central and South America. Or Portugal, in what is now Brazil or Cape Verde.
Now, the Italians with their Northern League (oh yes, “anti-establishment”, they love to say) firmly in government, are criminalizing people who are helping the ‘boat people’ sailing from Libya and other devastated African countries (mainly ruined by France and other EU nations) to reach Italian shores. Good ‘working people’ would rather if the refugees sank in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, as hundreds and thousands already have. And this anti-immigration rhetoric is actually being glorified as ‘brave’ and ‘anti-establishment’. How beastly, how low, the European culture continues to be. It was always ultra-violent and aggressive, but now it is also shallow, illogical and fanatic. It is not racist, anymore. It is far beyond that. It is turbo-racist, monstrously selfish. I often describe it as ‘fundamentalist’, not unlike what one encounters in the so-called ‘logic’ of movements such as ISIS and al Nusra.
In the U.S.A., the situation is not much better. Wall on the Mexican border? Study your history! The United States robbed half of Mexico, through expansionist wars. Most of migrants who are crossing the border illegally, are actually not Mexicans (Mexico is, with all its social problems, an OECD country), but from impoverished Central American nations. And why are these nations impoverished? Every time they democratically elect their progressive governments which would be ready to work on behalf of the people, the U.S. immediately applies its fascist dictatorial “Monroe Doctrine”, overthrows the government, injects right-wing death-squads, forces privatization, and strips the country of everything, like a locust. Don’t the people from Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras or Dominican Republic, have the full right to follow the loot, too, and settle near it, in the United States?
*
The Western doctrine is simple and at the same time, absolutely irrational. It is not defined, but if it were, it would read like this: “We can attack, rob, migrate wherever we choose to. Because we are white, Christian people with a superior culture and much better weapons than everyone else. No other reason, but this should suffice. Other people have to stay away, far away. Or else! If they disobey, they will be sunk by the Italians, beaten with rubber hoses on the open seas by the Greeks. Walls will be built, and people concentrated in repulsive camps, like what is being done if refugees try to cross from the south to North America.”
Oh, North America, where predominately first but also second and other generations of Europeans hunted down local native people like animals. Where the great majority of the First Nation died horrible deaths. Where the native people, in the U.S.A. and Canada, are often forced to live, to this day, in total destitution. North America, but also Australia – the same culture, same pattern, same ‘logic’.
And after murdering native people, what came next? Millions of Africans, in chains, brought as slaves by the Europeans, to build “the new world”. Men tortured and robbed of their dignity. Women tied in the fields and raped, day after day, by white plantation owners. Democracy. Freedom. Western-style.
Does such a ‘nation’, like the United States, have any moral right to decide who should cross its borders, and who to settle on its territory?
I don’t think so. Do you?
*
Things can be very different. Look at Russia during the Soviet Union. It never occupied the Central Asian republics. They joined voluntarily, and if you talk to people in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan, a great majority would happily join Russia, again; almost all feel nostalgic about the Soviet Union.
During the USSR, Moscow made sure that the standards of living in Tajikistan or Kirgizstan were almost the same as in Russia. Instead of plundering, Russia provided great subsidies and internationalist support.
And then, after the Soviet Union was destroyed by external forces, (the arms race with the West and by Western propaganda), the country broke into several independent states. And the flow of migrants began.
Russia never closed its borders. Travel from Central Asia (destabilized by Washington) to now rich Russia is easy. Millions of people from the former Soviet republics are happily working all over the Russian Federation. And there is no ‘moral obligation’ that the Russian state has towards them. All this is actually just common sense, respect for shared history and values, and normal human kindness.
*
Some will say, what the West did, it all happened long time ago. But no, it did not. It is still happening now, right now.
Of course, if you are frying your brains in some pub or club in London, or if you are sitting in a posh café in Paris, you would never think so. All you want is to be left alone, and to live your suave European life. A life built on the bones and blood of hundreds of millions of victims.
Huge and super-rich Europe cannot accommodate even one million of people flowing from the ruined Middle East? Seriously? Tiny Lebanon managed to survive an influx of 2 million refugees at the height of so-called “Syrian crises”. Crime rate did not skyrocket, country did not collapse. You know why? Because Lebanese people have heart and decency. While the West has nothing of that nature.
If your family became rich because it was robbing and murdering, would you want to return the booty? Would you open the doors to those whom your parents and brothers tortured and pillaged? Some would. After opening their eyes, they would. But not the West. It only takes. It never gives. It hates those who give. It smears, even attacks all decent nations.
The horrors are still happening right now, in devastated Afghanistan, a country reduced to ashes, after being designated as a training base for the fundamentalists ready to infiltrate and damage China, Russia, former Soviet Central Asia republics, Iran and Pakistan. I work there, I know. Or Syria. I work there too. Or Venezuela, one of my favorite countries on earth. And the list goes on and on.
I cannot anymore read those self-righteous, hypocritical outbursts, coming from the British, French, Italian, North American and Greek voters who only want benefits, while choosing to remain blind to the global genocides their regime is committing all over the world.
These people could not care less about who pays for their welfare, or how many millions die supplying them with their privileges.
They want more. They always complain “how poor and exploited they are”. They do not want to stop neo-colonialism. They only desire more money and better living conditions for themselves. “We are all humans”, they say. “We are all victims”. And then they vote in the extreme right-wing, and demand that the “refugees” be kept out.
They have blood on their hands. And most of them are not victims, but victimizers. They are not internationalists. Just mini-imperialists, selfish products of their culture of colonialism.
The West has to open the doors to the world which has been devastated during the long centuries.
Some people ‘outside’ have been literally turned into beggars, so the West could thrive.
‘Political correctness’ in London or New York lies, saying how wonderful the world outside is. No! It is not. Much of it is poor, gangrenous, horrid! Disgusting. Because it was made like that. Because it was beaten, violated, and robbed for centuries.
These people, the true victims, are demanding only two things: to be left alone and to be allowed to build their own nations, without Western military interventions, without self-serving NGO’s and Western-controlled U.N. agencies. That’s one.
Two, to go when they want to go, where their stolen riches are!
Either they will be let in, compensated and asked for forgiveness, or they will do what is their right: break the gates!
Why Are Anti-Migrant Arguments in the E.U., U.S. Pure Hypocrisy?
Almost every day we read about the latest outbursts in Europe, targeting pro-immigration policies. There are protests, even riots. Right-wing governments get voted in, allegedly, because the Europeans “have had enough of relaxed immigration regulations”.
That is what we are told. That’s what we are supposed to understand, and even sympathize with. Anti-immigration sentiments are even pitched to the world as something synonymous with the desire of Europeans “to gain independence from Brussels and the elites”. The right-wing, often racist, spoiled and selfish proletariat is portrayed by many as a long-suffering, hard-working group of people, with progressive aspirations.
If seen from a distance, such arguments are outrageous and even insulting; at least to the billions of those who have already lost their lives, throughout history; victims of the European and North American expansionist genocides. And to those individuals who have, until this day, had their motherlands ruined, livelihoods destroyed, political will violated, and in the end, free and unconditional entry denied; entry into those very countries that keep violating all international laws, while spreading terror and devastation to virtually all corners of the world.
*
In this essay, let us be as concrete as possible. Let us be brief.
I declare from the start, that every African person, every Asian, every citizen of the Middle East and every Latin American (how perverse this very name “Latin” and “America” is, anyway) should be able to freely enter both Europe and North America. Furthermore, he or she should be then allowed to stay for as long as desired, enjoying the free benefits and all those goodies that are being relished by Westerners.
To back this statement, here are several (but not all) basic moral and logical arguments:
First of all, Europe and North America do not belong to their people. They belong to the people from all corners of the globe. In order to build the so-called West, close to one billion (cumulatively, according to my friends, the UN statisticians) had to die, throughout modern and the not so modern history. Virtually everything, from theatres, schools, hospitals, parks, railroads, factories and museums, have been built, literally, on the bones and blood of the conquered peoples. And nothing much has really changed, to these days. Europe and later North America invaded almost the entire planet; they looted, killed, enslaved and tortured. They robbed the world of everything, and gave back nothing, except religion and a servile and toxic bunch of ‘elites’, who are continuously plundering their countries, on behalf of the West. Therefore, Europe and North America were built on credit, and now this credit is due.
Secondly, the Western culture, without any competition, is the most violent civilization on earth. I repeat, without any competition. It cannot be defeated militarily, without further losses; losses which could be easily counted in billions of human lives. Therefore, the only possibility of how to reduce the scale of further global tragedies, is to ‘dilute’ the West and its fundamentalist culture of racial and cultural superiority. The fact that Westerners are now in minority in such cities like London or New York, has not fully stop the U.K. and U.S.A. from committing monstrous crimes, attacking and pillaging foreign countries. But were Europe and North America still homogeneous, there would hardly be any free, independent country left anywhere in the world. Migration to the West is helping, at least to some extent, to save the world. Migrants, from the first and oldest generations, demand that the voices of non-westerners, would be listened to, at least some extent.
Furthermore, and this is of a course well-known argument: the only reason why people from previously wealthy countries like Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Iran or Syria are forced to emigrate, is because their nations were either bombed back to the Stone Age, or destroyed through sadistic sanctions. Why? So, there would be change of the government, and instead of local citizens, the profits from natural resources would benefit Western corporations. Also, of course, in order to prevent the “Domino Effect”. The West hates the idea of the “Domino Effect”: read, the regional or global influence of Communist, socialist or progressive governments which would be determined to improve the lives of their people. West needs obedient, frightened slaves, not great heroes and bright thinkers! To stop the “Domino Effect”, millions had to die in the 1965 coup in Indonesia, in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, to name just a few unfortunate nations. If you come to a rich, socially-balanced nation, rob it of everything, overthrow its government, and reduce it to a ‘failed state’, in order for your own nation and people to prosper, would you be shocked if some of its people were to decide to try to follow the resources that you have stolen; meaning, moving to your own country?
The reason why people in the West do not follow this train of logic is simply because they are thoroughly ignorant; trying extremely hard, for decades and centuries, to remain blind. If they claim ignorance, they don’t have to act. They can just enjoy the loot, without paying the price. It is simple, isn’t it?
*
Are those right-wing voters in the U.K., in Hungary, in Greece, France and Italy, as well as in other EU countries, really so blind, or so morally corrupt, that they do not see the reality?
Do they expect to have a ‘free ride’ for another century or two?
Do they teach history in European schools? I wonder. And if they do, what kind of history? I was shocked to realize that even some of my Spanish friends who are working for the United Nations, have absolutely no clue about the barbarity their country had committed in Central and South America. Or Portugal, in what is now Brazil or Cape Verde.
Now, the Italians with their Northern League (oh yes, “anti-establishment”, they love to say) firmly in government, are criminalizing people who are helping the ‘boat people’ sailing from Libya and other devastated African countries (mainly ruined by France and other EU nations) to reach Italian shores. Good ‘working people’ would rather if the refugees sank in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, as hundreds and thousands already have. And this anti-immigration rhetoric is actually being glorified as ‘brave’ and ‘anti-establishment’. How beastly, how low, the European culture continues to be. It was always ultra-violent and aggressive, but now it is also shallow, illogical and fanatic. It is not racist, anymore. It is far beyond that. It is turbo-racist, monstrously selfish. I often describe it as ‘fundamentalist’, not unlike what one encounters in the so-called ‘logic’ of movements such as ISIS and al Nusra.
In the U.S.A., the situation is not much better. Wall on the Mexican border? Study your history! The United States robbed half of Mexico, through expansionist wars. Most of migrants who are crossing the border illegally, are actually not Mexicans (Mexico is, with all its social problems, an OECD country), but from impoverished Central American nations. And why are these nations impoverished? Every time they democratically elect their progressive governments which would be ready to work on behalf of the people, the U.S. immediately applies its fascist dictatorial “Monroe Doctrine”, overthrows the government, injects right-wing death-squads, forces privatization, and strips the country of everything, like a locust. Don’t the people from Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras or Dominican Republic, have the full right to follow the loot, too, and settle near it, in the United States?
*
The Western doctrine is simple and at the same time, absolutely irrational. It is not defined, but if it were, it would read like this: “We can attack, rob, migrate wherever we choose to. Because we are white, Christian people with a superior culture and much better weapons than everyone else. No other reason, but this should suffice. Other people have to stay away, far away. Or else! If they disobey, they will be sunk by the Italians, beaten with rubber hoses on the open seas by the Greeks. Walls will be built, and people concentrated in repulsive camps, like what is being done if refugees try to cross from the south to North America.”
Oh, North America, where predominately first but also second and other generations of Europeans hunted down local native people like animals. Where the great majority of the First Nation died horrible deaths. Where the native people, in the U.S.A. and Canada, are often forced to live, to this day, in total destitution. North America, but also Australia – the same culture, same pattern, same ‘logic’.
And after murdering native people, what came next? Millions of Africans, in chains, brought as slaves by the Europeans, to build “the new world”. Men tortured and robbed of their dignity. Women tied in the fields and raped, day after day, by white plantation owners. Democracy. Freedom. Western-style.
Does such a ‘nation’, like the United States, have any moral right to decide who should cross its borders, and who to settle on its territory?
I don’t think so. Do you?
*
Things can be very different. Look at Russia during the Soviet Union. It never occupied the Central Asian republics. They joined voluntarily, and if you talk to people in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan, a great majority would happily join Russia, again; almost all feel nostalgic about the Soviet Union.
During the USSR, Moscow made sure that the standards of living in Tajikistan or Kirgizstan were almost the same as in Russia. Instead of plundering, Russia provided great subsidies and internationalist support.
And then, after the Soviet Union was destroyed by external forces, (the arms race with the West and by Western propaganda), the country broke into several independent states. And the flow of migrants began.
Russia never closed its borders. Travel from Central Asia (destabilized by Washington) to now rich Russia is easy. Millions of people from the former Soviet republics are happily working all over the Russian Federation. And there is no ‘moral obligation’ that the Russian state has towards them. All this is actually just common sense, respect for shared history and values, and normal human kindness.
*
Some will say, what the West did, it all happened long time ago. But no, it did not. It is still happening now, right now.
Of course, if you are frying your brains in some pub or club in London, or if you are sitting in a posh café in Paris, you would never think so. All you want is to be left alone, and to live your suave European life. A life built on the bones and blood of hundreds of millions of victims.
Huge and super-rich Europe cannot accommodate even one million of people flowing from the ruined Middle East? Seriously? Tiny Lebanon managed to survive an influx of 2 million refugees at the height of so-called “Syrian crises”. Crime rate did not skyrocket, country did not collapse. You know why? Because Lebanese people have heart and decency. While the West has nothing of that nature.
If your family became rich because it was robbing and murdering, would you want to return the booty? Would you open the doors to those whom your parents and brothers tortured and pillaged? Some would. After opening their eyes, they would. But not the West. It only takes. It never gives. It hates those who give. It smears, even attacks all decent nations.
The horrors are still happening right now, in devastated Afghanistan, a country reduced to ashes, after being designated as a training base for the fundamentalists ready to infiltrate and damage China, Russia, former Soviet Central Asia republics, Iran and Pakistan. I work there, I know. Or Syria. I work there too. Or Venezuela, one of my favorite countries on earth. And the list goes on and on.
I cannot anymore read those self-righteous, hypocritical outbursts, coming from the British, French, Italian, North American and Greek voters who only want benefits, while choosing to remain blind to the global genocides their regime is committing all over the world.
These people could not care less about who pays for their welfare, or how many millions die supplying them with their privileges.
They want more. They always complain “how poor and exploited they are”. They do not want to stop neo-colonialism. They only desire more money and better living conditions for themselves. “We are all humans”, they say. “We are all victims”. And then they vote in the extreme right-wing, and demand that the “refugees” be kept out.
They have blood on their hands. And most of them are not victims, but victimizers. They are not internationalists. Just mini-imperialists, selfish products of their culture of colonialism.
The West has to open the doors to the world which has been devastated during the long centuries.
Some people ‘outside’ have been literally turned into beggars, so the West could thrive.
‘Political correctness’ in London or New York lies, saying how wonderful the world outside is. No! It is not. Much of it is poor, gangrenous, horrid! Disgusting. Because it was made like that. Because it was beaten, violated, and robbed for centuries.
These people, the true victims, are demanding only two things: to be left alone and to be allowed to build their own nations, without Western military interventions, without self-serving NGO’s and Western-controlled U.N. agencies. That’s one.
Two, to go when they want to go, where their stolen riches are!
Either they will be let in, compensated and asked for forgiveness, or they will do what is their right: break the gates!
Monday, July 15, 2019
SC193-3
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-looms-behind/
What Looms Behind
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a coherent pre-election debate about the mother-of-all-issues facing this republic, namely, that we can’t afford the living arrangements Americans think of as “normal” anymore. This quandary has stalked us since the millennium turned. It thunders through all the activities of daily life, and the tensions emanating from it are so agonizing and difficult to face that our politics have deflected off into the kind of hysteria spawned by bad dreams.
As the great Wendell Berry pointed out years ago, this is about the nation’s home economics: energy and resources in, production out, surplus wealth saved. America had a brush with reality in 2008 when all the distortions of our home economics came together and whapped the country between the eyes with a two-by-four. Our energy-in was faltering. US oil production had fallen to a new low of under 4 million barrels a day and we were importing around 15 million. We papered over the problem with borrowed money in ever-larger amounts. This dynamic prompted ever riskier work-arounds on Wall Street, especially “innovations” in securitized debt, which invited criminal shenanigans. It blew up badly. Wealth vaporized. Industries collapsed. Homes and jobs were lost. Lives ruined.
The fairy-tale narrative since then is that technology rode to the rescue. The shale oil miracle “solved” the energy-in problem. Sure seems like it. But lots of things aren’t what they seem to be. Shale oil was a neat stunt. Turns out you can produce a helluva lot of it by paying more to pull it out the ground than you get from selling it. You can goose the process nicely by paying for it with borrowed money. And so it has gone. America now produces a new record of over 12 million barrels a day, and most of the companies doing it can’t make a red cent. And since it is increasingly obvious that they won’t ever pay back the money they borrowed before, they are unlikely to get new loans to continue their profitless operations.
Notice how rapidly shale oil production shot up after 2008. It’s worth a peek at analyst Steve St. Angelo’s latest essay on shale oil company debt (Finance Costs Are Killing the Shale Industry) to understand just how this stunt worked. As blogger Tim Morgan at Surplus Energy Economics points out, the dis-economics of energy production — and shale oil in particular — are stealthily damaging everyday life: “…the world economy is already suffering from these effects, and these have prompted the adoption of successively riskier forms of financial manipulation in a failed effort to sustain economic ‘normality.’”
That tells you exactly why the stock markets are at record highs now, along with US oil production. What the nation doesn’t get is that the shale oil industry is sure to collapse, and at least as rapidly as it shot up. So, expect the stock markets to collapse with it, along with tremendous collateral damage to all the other instruments that represent “money” — bonds, currencies, and their derivatives. It will make the 2008 episode look like a mere overturned poker table when it happens. In the meantime, many of the activities enabled by the oil industry are wrecking the planet, not just CO2 emissions, but the plastics and chemical industries especially. So, the oil quandary bites at both ends: damned if it quits on us and damned if it keeps going.
That’s the main issue of our time. We’re faced with the imminent and rather drastic re-organization of everyday life in America without oil. It should be reasonable to assume that the process will be disorderly, and the longer we ignore it, the more disorderly it will be. Granted, it is a tall order for politicians to talk about things this scary. The hard truth is that intelligent responses to this quandary would require heroic effort and painful change — and would probably be emotionally unacceptable to voters. It would entail the dismantling of suburbia and all of the activities associated with it, a severe shrinking of government at every level, the abandonment of most of our military playthings and overseas commitments, a wholesale overturning of Agri-Biz as currently practiced (along with a transition to smaller scale farming with a much higher percentage of the population working at it), and a stupefying aggregate loss of perceived wealth.
I’m describing events that go far beyond the common understanding of political revolution — though these discontinuities will surely produce political and social strife of a high order. This mega-issue and its spinoffs are what looms behind all the pitiful political comedy of the moment, especially the incendiary buffooneries of race and “gender.” Ponder this as you read the latest New York Times sponsored melodramas about “white supremacy” and the unfair pay in women’s soccer tournaments.
What Looms Behind
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a coherent pre-election debate about the mother-of-all-issues facing this republic, namely, that we can’t afford the living arrangements Americans think of as “normal” anymore. This quandary has stalked us since the millennium turned. It thunders through all the activities of daily life, and the tensions emanating from it are so agonizing and difficult to face that our politics have deflected off into the kind of hysteria spawned by bad dreams.
As the great Wendell Berry pointed out years ago, this is about the nation’s home economics: energy and resources in, production out, surplus wealth saved. America had a brush with reality in 2008 when all the distortions of our home economics came together and whapped the country between the eyes with a two-by-four. Our energy-in was faltering. US oil production had fallen to a new low of under 4 million barrels a day and we were importing around 15 million. We papered over the problem with borrowed money in ever-larger amounts. This dynamic prompted ever riskier work-arounds on Wall Street, especially “innovations” in securitized debt, which invited criminal shenanigans. It blew up badly. Wealth vaporized. Industries collapsed. Homes and jobs were lost. Lives ruined.
The fairy-tale narrative since then is that technology rode to the rescue. The shale oil miracle “solved” the energy-in problem. Sure seems like it. But lots of things aren’t what they seem to be. Shale oil was a neat stunt. Turns out you can produce a helluva lot of it by paying more to pull it out the ground than you get from selling it. You can goose the process nicely by paying for it with borrowed money. And so it has gone. America now produces a new record of over 12 million barrels a day, and most of the companies doing it can’t make a red cent. And since it is increasingly obvious that they won’t ever pay back the money they borrowed before, they are unlikely to get new loans to continue their profitless operations.
Notice how rapidly shale oil production shot up after 2008. It’s worth a peek at analyst Steve St. Angelo’s latest essay on shale oil company debt (Finance Costs Are Killing the Shale Industry) to understand just how this stunt worked. As blogger Tim Morgan at Surplus Energy Economics points out, the dis-economics of energy production — and shale oil in particular — are stealthily damaging everyday life: “…the world economy is already suffering from these effects, and these have prompted the adoption of successively riskier forms of financial manipulation in a failed effort to sustain economic ‘normality.’”
That tells you exactly why the stock markets are at record highs now, along with US oil production. What the nation doesn’t get is that the shale oil industry is sure to collapse, and at least as rapidly as it shot up. So, expect the stock markets to collapse with it, along with tremendous collateral damage to all the other instruments that represent “money” — bonds, currencies, and their derivatives. It will make the 2008 episode look like a mere overturned poker table when it happens. In the meantime, many of the activities enabled by the oil industry are wrecking the planet, not just CO2 emissions, but the plastics and chemical industries especially. So, the oil quandary bites at both ends: damned if it quits on us and damned if it keeps going.
That’s the main issue of our time. We’re faced with the imminent and rather drastic re-organization of everyday life in America without oil. It should be reasonable to assume that the process will be disorderly, and the longer we ignore it, the more disorderly it will be. Granted, it is a tall order for politicians to talk about things this scary. The hard truth is that intelligent responses to this quandary would require heroic effort and painful change — and would probably be emotionally unacceptable to voters. It would entail the dismantling of suburbia and all of the activities associated with it, a severe shrinking of government at every level, the abandonment of most of our military playthings and overseas commitments, a wholesale overturning of Agri-Biz as currently practiced (along with a transition to smaller scale farming with a much higher percentage of the population working at it), and a stupefying aggregate loss of perceived wealth.
I’m describing events that go far beyond the common understanding of political revolution — though these discontinuities will surely produce political and social strife of a high order. This mega-issue and its spinoffs are what looms behind all the pitiful political comedy of the moment, especially the incendiary buffooneries of race and “gender.” Ponder this as you read the latest New York Times sponsored melodramas about “white supremacy” and the unfair pay in women’s soccer tournaments.
Sunday, July 14, 2019
SC193-2
https://www.globalresearch.ca/myth-low-interest-rates-stimulating-economic-growth-us/5683419
The Myth of Low Interest Rates Stimulating Economic Growth in the US
Tax cuts for the rich and near-rock bottom low interest rates don’t stimulate economic growth.
Corporations have been using the windfall for executive pay increases and bonuses, stock buybacks raising their valuations, mergers and acquisitions to reduce competition, dividends to shareholders, and offshore activities, including stashing trillions of dollars in tax havens.
Easy money and lots of it encourages speculation, a key driver to high equity valuations.
Productive investments stimulate economic growth and jobs creation, what’s been lacking in the US for years. When people have money they spend it.
A virtuous cycle of prosperity follows. The industrial America I grew up in was prosperous, a land of opportunity and its dream long gone.
Today the nation is in decline, thirdworldized for most of its people, an increasingly plutocratic, kleptocratic, police state, democracy for its privileged few alone.
In December 2008, the Fed cut its benchmark interest rate to near-zero (a range of zero to 0.25%).
From then to December 2015, the Fed funds rate remained at near-zero — seven years of unprecedented accommodative monetary policy, benefitting Wall Street and other monied interests at the expense of main street.
The current Fed Funds rate stands at 2.375%, harming savers and others on fixed incomes, especially retired individuals no longer employed.
According to marketplace.com, over a decade of low interests cost savers about half a trillion dollars, back door grand theft from the pockets of ordinary Americans.
Loss of needed income for most people means enduring a lower standard of living or going into debt to maintain a normal level.
Paul Craig Roberts explained that US monetary policy produced little economic growth since alleged recovery from the great recession began in 2009 — because inflation is understated.
People who eat, drive cars, pay rent or service mortgages, have medical bills, heat and/or air condition homes, and have kids in college know inflation better than talking head tout TV economists paid to deceive, not inform viewers.
In 1988, Fed economists Seth Carpenter and Selva Demiralp explained in somewhat technical language that quantitative easing (QE) doesn’t stimulate economic growth as falsely claimed.
Boosting aggregate demand is needed. Helicopter Ben Bernanke dropped lots of money on Wall Street when it should have gone to main street to grow the economy.
Financial asset prices soared while most Americans have endured protracted Depression conditions for over a decade, no end of it in prospect, and worse times ahead when the economy turns south.
Lower interest rates will compound the problem for savers and fixed income households, not alleviate it economically overall. Fed chairman Jerome Powell is ideologically similar to his recent predecessors.
David Stockman earlier called him “a Wall Street-coddl(er),” saying as Fed governor since May 2012, he voted “approximately 44 times to drastically falsify interest rates and to recklessly and fraudulently monetize trillions of the public debt…asphyxiating…prosperity in America.”
He’s “deep in the tank for the speculative classes…(T)here is really no hope at all that the era of Bubble Finance will end” – short of “a thundering financial crash” baked in the cake ahead eventually.
NYT editors are “in the tank for speculative classes”, headlining: “Time for the Fed to Cut Interest Rates.”
What followed was polar opposite reality, a recitation of deception, economic ignorance, or most likely both.
The Times falsely claimed the Fed “engineered the nation’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis,” ignoring main street, mired in longterm Depression conditions.
The Times: “Fed officials have lived in fear that too much job growth, too much wage growth — too much prosperity — would spark dangerous inflation. That is one reason there has not been enough job growth, wage growth or prosperity.”
Lack of productive investment and wrongheaded monetary policy is to blame, what the Times didn’t explain.
Most jobs created are rotten part-time or temp, low-pay, few or no benefit ones — because millions of high-pay good jobs were offshored to low-wage countries, why America’s high trade deficit exists, what the Times and other establishment media don’t explain.
Real unemployment exceeds 20%, not the official meaningless 3.7% rate. Underemployment is overwhelming, affecting most working Americans — their households impoverished or bordering it.
At 2.375%, there’s no justification to begin cutting rates, perhaps heading them back to near-zero as the economy weakens.
The Times: “(T)he argument for a rate cut is that the Fed should try to extend this economic expansion, which is now the longest period of uninterrupted growth in American history.”
“It would send a message that the Fed stands ready to do more to extend the economic expansion.”
“(I)t would demonstrate that Mr. Powell and his colleagues are serious when they talk about the importance of job growth and wage growth.”
One or more rate cuts will accomplish none of the above. They’ll perpetuate wrong-headed monetary policy since Alan Greenspan was Fed chairman, especially what the Fed pursued since 2008.
The economy needs what it’s not getting — productive investments to create growth and high-paying jobs, not more of the same failed monetary policy benefitting investors, not ordinary Americans.
The Myth of Low Interest Rates Stimulating Economic Growth in the US
Tax cuts for the rich and near-rock bottom low interest rates don’t stimulate economic growth.
Corporations have been using the windfall for executive pay increases and bonuses, stock buybacks raising their valuations, mergers and acquisitions to reduce competition, dividends to shareholders, and offshore activities, including stashing trillions of dollars in tax havens.
Easy money and lots of it encourages speculation, a key driver to high equity valuations.
Productive investments stimulate economic growth and jobs creation, what’s been lacking in the US for years. When people have money they spend it.
A virtuous cycle of prosperity follows. The industrial America I grew up in was prosperous, a land of opportunity and its dream long gone.
Today the nation is in decline, thirdworldized for most of its people, an increasingly plutocratic, kleptocratic, police state, democracy for its privileged few alone.
In December 2008, the Fed cut its benchmark interest rate to near-zero (a range of zero to 0.25%).
From then to December 2015, the Fed funds rate remained at near-zero — seven years of unprecedented accommodative monetary policy, benefitting Wall Street and other monied interests at the expense of main street.
The current Fed Funds rate stands at 2.375%, harming savers and others on fixed incomes, especially retired individuals no longer employed.
According to marketplace.com, over a decade of low interests cost savers about half a trillion dollars, back door grand theft from the pockets of ordinary Americans.
Loss of needed income for most people means enduring a lower standard of living or going into debt to maintain a normal level.
Paul Craig Roberts explained that US monetary policy produced little economic growth since alleged recovery from the great recession began in 2009 — because inflation is understated.
People who eat, drive cars, pay rent or service mortgages, have medical bills, heat and/or air condition homes, and have kids in college know inflation better than talking head tout TV economists paid to deceive, not inform viewers.
In 1988, Fed economists Seth Carpenter and Selva Demiralp explained in somewhat technical language that quantitative easing (QE) doesn’t stimulate economic growth as falsely claimed.
Boosting aggregate demand is needed. Helicopter Ben Bernanke dropped lots of money on Wall Street when it should have gone to main street to grow the economy.
Financial asset prices soared while most Americans have endured protracted Depression conditions for over a decade, no end of it in prospect, and worse times ahead when the economy turns south.
Lower interest rates will compound the problem for savers and fixed income households, not alleviate it economically overall. Fed chairman Jerome Powell is ideologically similar to his recent predecessors.
David Stockman earlier called him “a Wall Street-coddl(er),” saying as Fed governor since May 2012, he voted “approximately 44 times to drastically falsify interest rates and to recklessly and fraudulently monetize trillions of the public debt…asphyxiating…prosperity in America.”
He’s “deep in the tank for the speculative classes…(T)here is really no hope at all that the era of Bubble Finance will end” – short of “a thundering financial crash” baked in the cake ahead eventually.
NYT editors are “in the tank for speculative classes”, headlining: “Time for the Fed to Cut Interest Rates.”
What followed was polar opposite reality, a recitation of deception, economic ignorance, or most likely both.
The Times falsely claimed the Fed “engineered the nation’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis,” ignoring main street, mired in longterm Depression conditions.
The Times: “Fed officials have lived in fear that too much job growth, too much wage growth — too much prosperity — would spark dangerous inflation. That is one reason there has not been enough job growth, wage growth or prosperity.”
Lack of productive investment and wrongheaded monetary policy is to blame, what the Times didn’t explain.
Most jobs created are rotten part-time or temp, low-pay, few or no benefit ones — because millions of high-pay good jobs were offshored to low-wage countries, why America’s high trade deficit exists, what the Times and other establishment media don’t explain.
Real unemployment exceeds 20%, not the official meaningless 3.7% rate. Underemployment is overwhelming, affecting most working Americans — their households impoverished or bordering it.
At 2.375%, there’s no justification to begin cutting rates, perhaps heading them back to near-zero as the economy weakens.
The Times: “(T)he argument for a rate cut is that the Fed should try to extend this economic expansion, which is now the longest period of uninterrupted growth in American history.”
“It would send a message that the Fed stands ready to do more to extend the economic expansion.”
“(I)t would demonstrate that Mr. Powell and his colleagues are serious when they talk about the importance of job growth and wage growth.”
One or more rate cuts will accomplish none of the above. They’ll perpetuate wrong-headed monetary policy since Alan Greenspan was Fed chairman, especially what the Fed pursued since 2008.
The economy needs what it’s not getting — productive investments to create growth and high-paying jobs, not more of the same failed monetary policy benefitting investors, not ordinary Americans.
Saturday, July 13, 2019
SC193-1
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51862.htm
O, Say, Can You See
All rise! It is the anniversary of this conflicted, sclerotic, blind, self-destructive country. There will be celebrations. Glitzy extravaganzas of flash and fireworks providing the shimmering eye candy to camouflage the corpse of the myth that is centerpiece and theme our national shivaree.
A nation built on genocide and slavery, with a Constitution launched with sanctimonious pieties never meant to be honored, ranking property over people, with blood-and-guts Capitalism--wealth and privilege--enthroned to rule an emasculated citizenry concussed by propaganda: this is the “exceptional” America we swarm on this day to extol.
From infancy we are indoctrinated with the fairy tale of our own magnificence; inoculated with the toxic serum of race arrogance; infected with the poisonous virus of violence.
And what noble wonders has America wrought behind its hero story? We’re told we won two World Wars. In fact, we barely showed in the First, after Europe cannibalized itself; and we stalled until Russia, at staggering human cost, pulverized the Wehrmacht to win the Second. We made the world safe, not for Democracy but for Wall Street Capitalism, which made a killing on both bloodbaths, and on destroying and nukeing Bushido-addled fascist Japan.
Hey, but how about the job we did on Latin America? We turned that entire continent into a ghastly vivisection lab for psychotic military monsters, paid to run their countries as Dachaus, gulags, for American Capital. What we could not buy or steal, we raped. Where we couldn’t install our native murderers and US-trained military brutes to crush their people we did our own crushing--in Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba--and where rebellion lived, we funded the murder of generations of defiant young idealists in Chile, Argentina, Brazil. The dead hand of our “intelligence” vampires is at its grisly trade now, bleeding Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras.
And what of our notorious “Nation Building”, seeding our lethal “freedom and liberty” wherever there is some wealth we have not pirated, or some native eccentric that won’t sell his soul to our IMF ganefs. This is best exemplified by the sickening, barbaric massacre of the simple, guiltless peasants of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya. According to one sick US Harpy, “we” feel that killing their children is “worth it”. The depraved Hillary, queried on our Libyan gorefest, cackled: “we came, we saw, he died”.
Ah, well, you will say, even if all that is true, you leave out the many grand, humane things America has done for its own people. Yes... And what are those things?
Social Security! Medicare! True, in 1935 the U.S. passed the Social Security Act and in ‘66, Medicare, programs that now rank below those of every developed nation on earth. It has rued them ever since, damning both as unjustified “entitlements”, vowing that inadequate, inflation-devoured rates and benefits will not increase, but rather must be abolished as immoral. Their doctrinal, fantasy “invisible hand of the market” exists only as a fist to smash the people, never to care for them, though they are the state.
Under both duller, dumber Republican, or slick, bullshitting Democrat presidencies, there has been total stagnation in workers’ wages for fifty years, jobs eliminated or exported, obscene profits only to the Super Rich. The gap between the .001% and the rest of us was not so vast even under J.P. Morgan and the Robber Barons. Four men now have as much wealth as the lower 50% of the country.
But if you are fairly well off, have a soul and all this appalls you, you will retreat to the defensive posture you know: No matter the evil and falsity of America, it has provided you a decent life, a home, a job, some comfort and safety.
And there’s the cognitive rub. Americans are comfortable enjoying every privilege available at their level, from Bud Lite and food stamps to Romanee-Conti and Kobe Beef.
There is nothing inherently evil or even remarkable about this. It’s what humans do. What is disgraceful is to do it out of willful ignorance of how such privilege is possible. What is unforgivable is to know it is due to the rape and looting of the world and celebrate it... because it’s for you.
O, Say, Can You See
All rise! It is the anniversary of this conflicted, sclerotic, blind, self-destructive country. There will be celebrations. Glitzy extravaganzas of flash and fireworks providing the shimmering eye candy to camouflage the corpse of the myth that is centerpiece and theme our national shivaree.
A nation built on genocide and slavery, with a Constitution launched with sanctimonious pieties never meant to be honored, ranking property over people, with blood-and-guts Capitalism--wealth and privilege--enthroned to rule an emasculated citizenry concussed by propaganda: this is the “exceptional” America we swarm on this day to extol.
From infancy we are indoctrinated with the fairy tale of our own magnificence; inoculated with the toxic serum of race arrogance; infected with the poisonous virus of violence.
And what noble wonders has America wrought behind its hero story? We’re told we won two World Wars. In fact, we barely showed in the First, after Europe cannibalized itself; and we stalled until Russia, at staggering human cost, pulverized the Wehrmacht to win the Second. We made the world safe, not for Democracy but for Wall Street Capitalism, which made a killing on both bloodbaths, and on destroying and nukeing Bushido-addled fascist Japan.
Hey, but how about the job we did on Latin America? We turned that entire continent into a ghastly vivisection lab for psychotic military monsters, paid to run their countries as Dachaus, gulags, for American Capital. What we could not buy or steal, we raped. Where we couldn’t install our native murderers and US-trained military brutes to crush their people we did our own crushing--in Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba--and where rebellion lived, we funded the murder of generations of defiant young idealists in Chile, Argentina, Brazil. The dead hand of our “intelligence” vampires is at its grisly trade now, bleeding Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras.
And what of our notorious “Nation Building”, seeding our lethal “freedom and liberty” wherever there is some wealth we have not pirated, or some native eccentric that won’t sell his soul to our IMF ganefs. This is best exemplified by the sickening, barbaric massacre of the simple, guiltless peasants of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya. According to one sick US Harpy, “we” feel that killing their children is “worth it”. The depraved Hillary, queried on our Libyan gorefest, cackled: “we came, we saw, he died”.
Ah, well, you will say, even if all that is true, you leave out the many grand, humane things America has done for its own people. Yes... And what are those things?
Social Security! Medicare! True, in 1935 the U.S. passed the Social Security Act and in ‘66, Medicare, programs that now rank below those of every developed nation on earth. It has rued them ever since, damning both as unjustified “entitlements”, vowing that inadequate, inflation-devoured rates and benefits will not increase, but rather must be abolished as immoral. Their doctrinal, fantasy “invisible hand of the market” exists only as a fist to smash the people, never to care for them, though they are the state.
Under both duller, dumber Republican, or slick, bullshitting Democrat presidencies, there has been total stagnation in workers’ wages for fifty years, jobs eliminated or exported, obscene profits only to the Super Rich. The gap between the .001% and the rest of us was not so vast even under J.P. Morgan and the Robber Barons. Four men now have as much wealth as the lower 50% of the country.
But if you are fairly well off, have a soul and all this appalls you, you will retreat to the defensive posture you know: No matter the evil and falsity of America, it has provided you a decent life, a home, a job, some comfort and safety.
And there’s the cognitive rub. Americans are comfortable enjoying every privilege available at their level, from Bud Lite and food stamps to Romanee-Conti and Kobe Beef.
There is nothing inherently evil or even remarkable about this. It’s what humans do. What is disgraceful is to do it out of willful ignorance of how such privilege is possible. What is unforgivable is to know it is due to the rape and looting of the world and celebrate it... because it’s for you.
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