https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug19/hell-virtue-signaling8-19.html
The Road to Hell Is Paved with Virtue-Signaling
Here in the decay phase of Imperial Pretensions, The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. It's a line from Yeats' poem The Second Coming, and it speaks to our current stumbling descent toward the abyss, where the worst invest their energies in virtue-signaling and the best retreat from the hopelessness of actually addressing our real-world problems.
The road to Hell is paved with virtue-signaling: rather than actually solve the knotty problems that are dragging us toward the abyss, we substitute self-righteousness for problem-solving. That is virtue-signaling in a nutshell.
Virtue-signaling goes hand in hand with the only "solution" that's politically correct: throw a borrowed trillion dollars at the "problem", dance the humba-humba around the bonfire at midnight and hope that magic will resolve the underlying issues.
Hence the calls for Medicare for All, Universal Basic Income, and free college for all, all paid with borrowed money, despite the virtuous bleatings that "taxes on the rich/robots" will magically pay for trillions of additional dollars to be squandered on corrupt, self-serving cartels.
The well-being of the American populace is broken, with well-being including mental and physical health, financial security and access to all forms of capital, including education, infrastructure and functioning institutions.
Throwing more money at the cartels that have failed--defense, governance, healthcare and higher education--won't solve anything. The health of the American populace is in long-term decline for structural reasons: our diet has deteriorated, our fitness has deteriorated, our educational inputs regarding diet, fitness and health have deteriorated. Popping another $1,000 a month pill doesn't restore health or well-being, yet that's what the healthcare cartel profits from: managing our sickness.
As for the "defense" industry, a.k.a. the military-industrial-intelligence cartel: rather than do the hard work of redefining America's role in the world (declining to pursue wars of choice and policing the world) and then right-sizing the armed forces for the emerging realities of automated warfare, cyber-warfare and asymmetric warfare, we spend trillions of dollars on a jumble of horribly costly legacy weaponry with a sprinkling of pixie-dust "innovation."
This also describes the higher education cartel, a horribly costly legacy jumble that's failing students while enriching insiders and lenders. It also describes the standard institutional response to knotty issues such as homelessness: the conventional legacy "solution" is to insist on building "affordable" housing at $400,000 per unit, which means we can build 1,000 units rather than the 100,000 units of super-low-cost housing we need.
In a climate where passionately intense self-righteousness is substituted for actual problem-solving, anyone willing to consider real-world knotty problems is shouted down. It's impossible to even discuss issues of citizenship and immigration as they relate to the long-term impact of devaluing citizenship, or the impact on aging infrastructure designed for a much smaller population.
It's impossible to even discuss systematically downsizing America's role and military footprint without being accused of treason, as virtue-signaling support for the Imperial Project is necessary to broadcast your membership in the politically correct camp.
It's impossible to even discuss the connection between the high-profit snacks and sugar-water beverages that fill supermarket shelves and diabesity and metabolic disorders, or the connection between the decline of community and the rise of the Savior State.
The idea that everything will be solved if we borrow a couple more trillion and give it away is the dominant paradigm. We all understand why: solving difficult real-world problems in a fraying society riven by shrill "advocacy" (i.e. give "us" the free money rather than giving it to "them") is immensely more challenging than passionately intense self-righteousness (virtue-signaling) and borrowing as many trillions as needed to keep a bloated, ineffective, corrupt status quo glued together for another quarter or another year.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The road to Hell is paved with virtue-signaling, and we are about to discover that virtue-signaling, self-righteousness and indignation are not substitutes for the difficult task of completely restructuring failing institutions, modes of production and governance.
Saturday, August 17, 2019
Friday, August 16, 2019
SC195-5
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-waging-wars-on-multiple-fronts-cold-wars-hot-wars-economic-wars-propaganda-wars/5686511
US Waging Wars on Multiple Fronts: Cold Wars, Hot Wars, Economic Wars, Propaganda Wars …
Supported by both hawkish wings of its war party, the US is waging hot wars, cold wars, economic wars, financial wars, trade wars, anti-social justice wars, anti-human rights wars, anti-democracy wars, propaganda wars, sanctions wars, tariffs wars, protest wars, homeland wars, and environmental wars on multiple fronts worldwide — ordinary people everywhere the losers.
During decades of Cold War years, the US got along with Soviet Russia, even if uneasily at times. Nixon went to China. Relations today with both countries and many others are more dismal and dangerous than any previous time in the post-WW II period.
New wars could erupt without warning. The threat of possible nuclear war is ominously real by accident or design.
The land of opportunity I remember as a youth is now consumed by its hubris, arrogance, rage to colonize planet earth, control its resources and exploit it people.
New Deal, Fair Deal, Great Society years I grew up in were replaced by neoliberal harshness, endless wars on humanity at home and abroad, a growing wealth disparity exceeding the robber baron years, along with mass unemployment and underemployment, growing homelessness, hunger, and poverty, as well as a ruling class dismissive of the public welfare.
Current US leadership is militantly hawkish and anti-populist, led by a racist geopolitical/economic know-nothing/reality TV president.
Dark forces run things, headquartered on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms, the rule of law replaced by police state governance, a free and open society by mass surveillance and growing totalitarianism.
Challenging authority disruptively with collective activism when vitally needed is absent.
The US reached peak power, prominence, influence, and leadership on the world stage following WW II, the only major nation left unscathed by its ravages.
Its preemptive war of aggression on nonbelligerent North Korea, a nation threatening no one, started its downward trajectory.
Today it’s a nation in decline while China, Russia and other countries are rising. It spends countless trillions of dollars for militarism and warmaking against invented enemies. No real ones exist.
Its preeminence as a military super-power was overtaken by Russia, China heading toward becoming the world’s leading economic power one day, multi-world polarity replacing unipolarity the US favors to dominate other nations.
Its rage for maintaining a global empire of bases as platforms for endless wars of aggression came at the expense of eroding social justice on the chopping block for elimination altogether.
The myth of American exceptionalism, the indispensable state, an illusory moral superiority, and military supremacy persist despite hard evidence debunking these notions.
Democracy in America is fiction, not fact, a system of governance its ruling class abhors, tolerating it nowhere, nations like Venezuela targeted to replace it with fascist rule.
The US is plagued by the same dynamic that doomed all other empires in history.
It’s an increasingly repressive/secretive/intrusive warrior state, spreading death, destruction and human misery worldwide.
It exploits ordinary people to serve privileged interests — a pariah state/declining power because of its unwillingness to change.
Its war machine never rests. Its criminal class is bipartisan. Its governance meets the definition of fascism — wrapped in the American flag.
It’s a corporate/political partnership over the rights and welfare of ordinary people, exploiting them for power and profits — at home and abroad.
It’s way too late for scattered reforms. The American way is too debauched to fix.
Nothing short of revolutionary change can work. Yet there’s not a hint of it in prospect because of a know-nothing populace distracted and controlled by bread, circuses, and the power of state-approved/media disseminated propaganda.
A decade ago, the late Doug Dowd said “(t)he world now stands on a cliff’s edge.”
He envisioned “four related groups of horrors: existing and likely wars, a fragile world economy, pervasive and deepening corruption, and the earth dangerously near the ‘tipping point’ of environmental disaster.”
It’s not a pretty picture, things worse now than years earlier.
A permanent state of war exists with no prospect for peace in our time — while freedom in the US and West erode toward disappearing altogether the way things are heading.
US Waging Wars on Multiple Fronts: Cold Wars, Hot Wars, Economic Wars, Propaganda Wars …
Supported by both hawkish wings of its war party, the US is waging hot wars, cold wars, economic wars, financial wars, trade wars, anti-social justice wars, anti-human rights wars, anti-democracy wars, propaganda wars, sanctions wars, tariffs wars, protest wars, homeland wars, and environmental wars on multiple fronts worldwide — ordinary people everywhere the losers.
During decades of Cold War years, the US got along with Soviet Russia, even if uneasily at times. Nixon went to China. Relations today with both countries and many others are more dismal and dangerous than any previous time in the post-WW II period.
New wars could erupt without warning. The threat of possible nuclear war is ominously real by accident or design.
The land of opportunity I remember as a youth is now consumed by its hubris, arrogance, rage to colonize planet earth, control its resources and exploit it people.
New Deal, Fair Deal, Great Society years I grew up in were replaced by neoliberal harshness, endless wars on humanity at home and abroad, a growing wealth disparity exceeding the robber baron years, along with mass unemployment and underemployment, growing homelessness, hunger, and poverty, as well as a ruling class dismissive of the public welfare.
Current US leadership is militantly hawkish and anti-populist, led by a racist geopolitical/economic know-nothing/reality TV president.
Dark forces run things, headquartered on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms, the rule of law replaced by police state governance, a free and open society by mass surveillance and growing totalitarianism.
Challenging authority disruptively with collective activism when vitally needed is absent.
The US reached peak power, prominence, influence, and leadership on the world stage following WW II, the only major nation left unscathed by its ravages.
Its preemptive war of aggression on nonbelligerent North Korea, a nation threatening no one, started its downward trajectory.
Today it’s a nation in decline while China, Russia and other countries are rising. It spends countless trillions of dollars for militarism and warmaking against invented enemies. No real ones exist.
Its preeminence as a military super-power was overtaken by Russia, China heading toward becoming the world’s leading economic power one day, multi-world polarity replacing unipolarity the US favors to dominate other nations.
Its rage for maintaining a global empire of bases as platforms for endless wars of aggression came at the expense of eroding social justice on the chopping block for elimination altogether.
The myth of American exceptionalism, the indispensable state, an illusory moral superiority, and military supremacy persist despite hard evidence debunking these notions.
Democracy in America is fiction, not fact, a system of governance its ruling class abhors, tolerating it nowhere, nations like Venezuela targeted to replace it with fascist rule.
The US is plagued by the same dynamic that doomed all other empires in history.
It’s an increasingly repressive/secretive/intrusive warrior state, spreading death, destruction and human misery worldwide.
It exploits ordinary people to serve privileged interests — a pariah state/declining power because of its unwillingness to change.
Its war machine never rests. Its criminal class is bipartisan. Its governance meets the definition of fascism — wrapped in the American flag.
It’s a corporate/political partnership over the rights and welfare of ordinary people, exploiting them for power and profits — at home and abroad.
It’s way too late for scattered reforms. The American way is too debauched to fix.
Nothing short of revolutionary change can work. Yet there’s not a hint of it in prospect because of a know-nothing populace distracted and controlled by bread, circuses, and the power of state-approved/media disseminated propaganda.
A decade ago, the late Doug Dowd said “(t)he world now stands on a cliff’s edge.”
He envisioned “four related groups of horrors: existing and likely wars, a fragile world economy, pervasive and deepening corruption, and the earth dangerously near the ‘tipping point’ of environmental disaster.”
It’s not a pretty picture, things worse now than years earlier.
A permanent state of war exists with no prospect for peace in our time — while freedom in the US and West erode toward disappearing altogether the way things are heading.
Thursday, August 15, 2019
SC195-4
https://eand.co/why-the-megacapitalist-global-economy-america-made-is-imploding-397a1d3ab791
The Megacapitalist Global Economy America Made Is Imploding
Authoritarian-Fascism is Rising Simultaneously in China, India, and America — and What it Should Teach Us For Tomorrow
Here’s a tiny question: is it just a cosmic coincidence that three of the world’s most significant countries — China, India, and America — are all beginning to have various stages of political destabilization and authoritarian collapse? Os there is something more to it? I think it has everything to do with this.
America’s just run a titanic, historic experiment in global capitalism. One that’s failed catastrophically. Nobody, though, really seems to have noticed yet. It should be teaching us a crucial and vital lesson. That America’s model of global megacapitalism — in which India and China were the two most crucial linchpins — failed, because capitalism implodes inevitably into fascism. It should be showing us that we need to think much more clearly about our societies, if we want a future again.
Here was the theory. Following America’s lead, countries like India and China could get rich. All they had to do was trade with America — become parts of its global capitalist economy. And as a result, wealth would bring with it democracy. More capitalism — more freedom, more equality, more democracy.
Here’s the reality. None of that ended up being true. China and India didn’t end up more democratic and equal as they became more capitalist. They became less democratic and equal — to the point that they are now verging on authoritarian-fascist societies. Just like America is.
(And these three countries, my friends, also have three of the world’s biggest militaries. What do you think portends for the future? As their societies and futures come undone? Let’s start with now.)
Let’s start with India. There, a kind of hypernationalist fervor has taken hold, based on religious chauvinism. The idea of a secular, liberal India is dying — and the idea of India as a cleansed land of the pure is ascendant. “Hindu nationalism”, some call it. Let us speak more plainly. India is having a kind of theofascist collapse. The Promised Land, which belongs only to the pure — and they rule it absolutely. None of this is theoretical in the slightest. Journalists are harassed and intimidated, dissidents are jailed, the norms of culture and society have shifted rapidly, the tone and message of public discourse has altered radically. How can a secular democracy coexist with the norms of authoritarian-fascism? Obviously, it can’t.
Then there’s China. There, a kind of strange technologically enabled authoritarianism has risen. Technology is used to crack down on people, to stifle dissent, not just to surveil, but to enforce. Want to use that train? Want to enter that mall? You’d better have a good Social Credit Score. But that’s hardly. A million people are reported to have been detained in China’s “re-education camps.” The internet, of course, is watched carefully, and censored. We might call all this techno-fascism.
(Then, of course, there’s America. Camps, raids, Gestapos…Jews warning en masse of rising fascism…a media and thinking class utterly oblivious to it…a political opposition that appeases instead of opposes…hence, supremacist massacres, abuses of power, hate, dehumanization, and violations of basic rights are now everyday realities Americans simply shrug impotently at).
Wait…wasn’t capitalism supposed to bring freedom and democracy with it? Isn’t that what every American thinker, economist, pundit, politician argued? Isn’t it why America bombed half the world for capitalism’s sake? So…what happened?
Here’s what’s really happening. Capitalism’s imploding into fascism. And now it’s going global. The global economy America built is falling like dominoes. Bang, bang, bang.
It’s not a coincidence that China and India are imploding into different kinds of authoritarian-fascism shortly after America did. It is a relationship. China and India were the linchpins of America’s model of global capitalism. They are the two countries that bought into it most heavily after America.And now, my friends, they are paying the price: they are collapsing right along with it.
Let me explain how. It’s very straightforward. You don’t need to be an economist to understand it.
The capitalist global economy that America built was premised on a very simple idea. The American “consumer” was at the heart of the system. He or she receives the lowest price possible — by any means necessary. That’s all people need to live, not healthcare, retirement, education, and so forth — including the ones making the stuff cheap for the American consumer. Along the way, profits are mega-maximized for capitalists, too, because they pay people a pittance, and build huge monopolies. And with greater profits — don’t ask how, because American economists and pundits have never explained — comes more freedom and democracy.
You can see, perhaps, already, how poorly thought out this system was.
In this system, China was the key supplier of material goods, and India the key supplier of services. Walmart was nothing in the 80s, and then in the 90s and 00s, it grew to prominence and power, largely by becoming a Chinese trading outpost, cramming giant warehouses with ultra cheap Chinese goods. America’s technology and finance industries grew wealthy, too, by “outsourcing” programming and whatnot to India.
Now, there were three Big Problems with America’s model of global capitalism, meaning American consumers bought stuff made cheap by Chinese and Indians.
First, this system depended on exploiting people. Not Americans — Indians and Chinese. They were able to make things much more cheaply precisely because they didn’t have the rights and protections of people in advanced countries. So Chinese teenagers made iPhones living in company dorms — making a tiny, tiny fraction of what those iPhones were worth, while Apple piled up billions, then became the world’s first trillion dollar company. Indians and Chinese were exploited in classic terms: never paid a fair share, their rights stunted and eroded. How could democracy ever emerge from that? Wouldn’t the result just be inequality and despair and rage?
Second, this system wasn’t self sustaining. The point was to give “the American consumer” ultra cheap stuff, by exploiting half the world or so. But then who was then going to give him or her a job? If Chinese and Indians were making all the stuff Americans consumed…then what exactly would Americans do? How would American incomes ever rise again? They could hardly make the stuff Chinese and Indians consumed…because those people were still too poor to afford much.
The result was that the American economy had a hidden collapse, an invisible depression. Decent jobs dried. Entire industries vanished. As a consequence, the middle class shrunk to a minority for the first time ever in the history of a rich country. Today, the only growing jobs in the American economy are being neo-servants to the super rich: their butlers, chauffeurs, maids, cleaners, nannies, barbers.
Is all this beginning to make a little sense yet? Let me put more sharply.
The result of America’s model of global capitalism was grimly predictable, to anyone who thinks clearly about capitalism. Capital’s share of income would rise — while labour’s share of income would peak, stagnate, and then fall. And that’s exactly what happened — because that’s what capitalism does. In America’s labour’s share of income peaked in the 1970s. In China and India, it peaked in the 00s, and has been falling ever since.
What would happen, though, when labour’s share of income stagnated and fell long enough, while capital’s share skyrocketed? What kind of social discontents and upheavals would that ignite? Nobody in the thinking class asked. They were too busy gazing adoringly at the new religion they’d created, reciting its articles of faith. Meanwhile, the reality was this.
America’s model of global capitalism was rewarding capitalists far, far more than the average prole — whom it was leaving exploited, politically, economically, and socially, leaving their societies ever less democratic, sophisticated, bereft of public goods, hollowed out culturally, status competition and envy and resentment ascendant.
But capitalists are a tiny number of people in society. As a result, a new class of mega-rich emerged. The Chinese tourists whose families owned entire state industries, that would be seen shopping in Barney’s or Harrods…places largely empty of Americans or Brits. The Indian tycoons who built entire skyscrapers to live in — having owned the “outsourcing” platforms that made the American economy go. And so forth. This tiny new class of ultra-rich were in fact the winners of America’s model of global capitalism. But everyone else, more or less, wasn’t winning nearly enough to call this global economy a success. China and India got their own Kardashians and Trumps — while never improving very much, really, on any measure of human rights, democracy, the rule of law, equality, or freedom.
So. Three Big Problems. One, exploitation of India and China’s poor. Two, impoverishment and implosion of the American middle class. Three, the emergence of a class of ultra-rich, who took the lion’s share gains from the other two. You could put the results like this: India and China traded capitalism for democracy. Just like America did. Contrary to the theory, capitalism didn’t bring democracy with it — it eroded and corroded it. It’s norms, values, rules, codes, incentives, structures.
Now, it’s important to note that it didn’t have to be this way. India and China could, for example, have joined the EU’s sphere of influence, trading with it, culturally linking with it, following its lead. They chose to become mini-Americas, to join America’s global economic system, to become the engines of America’s stock market growth and so forth, instead. Their choice — a fatal and ruinous one. They chose to become capitalist societies instead of social democracies. But capitalism implodes. Hence, India and China at this juncture in history.
American economists and pundits and politicians have never been the sharpest tools in the shed — so even when these problems were pointed out, they were dismissed. The first problem — Chinese and Indians being exploited to make stuff artificially cheaply for Americans — was imagined away as “the growth of the Asian and Chinese middle class.” It’s true that middle classes grew — but in a misshapen, bent kind of way. Not into true middle classes — a social entity with protections, rights, security, stability, safety. But into entities of despair, rage, and frustration. No matter how much richer those new “middle classes” got, they could never afford to keep up with the cost of living, which was pushed ever higher. These were fake middle classes, counterfeits of the real thing.
What happens when people are exploited? Well, sooner or later, they rebel against their failed systems. They search for a source of strength and pride. They begin to blame anyone different for their problems — never quite being able to make ends meet, anxiety, despair, insecurity, the fears of being left behind of never being rich enough to feel safe. And that’s exactly what happened. An aggressive techno-fascism rose in China. A chauvinist theofascism is rising in India. And in America, of course, fascism has already built camps and tortures little kids in them, while Americans watch, sullen, silent, defeated.
And yet these three events are far from disconnected. It’s not a coincidence that the linchpins of the global economy America built, America’s most significant economic partners, are facing political destabilization and authoritarian upheaval — just like America is. It’s a relationship. Capitalism implodes into fascism, by way of inequality, despair, greed, precarity — as labour’s share of income stagnates, but capital’s skyrockets. A society turns to hate and violence to expel the rage which has come to consume it. All the classic ills of capitalism emerged in all three of these societies — and those classic ills, from economic inequality to financial speculation to psychological narcissism to structural insecurity to socioeconomic precarity — implode into fascism.
Let me say it again, because it matters that we all understand it right about now. Capitalism implodes into fascism, as capital’s share of incomes skyrockets, but labour’s stagnates and falls. “Capital” is a tiny number of people — but labour is everyone else. No society can persist or endure when just a tiny few are growing unimaginably rich — and everyone else is forever struggling. Fascisms and authoritarians rise in the vacuum left behind. rises But that’s what America’s model of global capitalism was always going to lead to.
This is the true end of American empire. And it is going to be an ugly and violent thing. You see, here’s a disturbing fact: these three countries also have the largest militaries in the world. But there’s not room for three fascisms in one world. There’s only room for one. And so these now competing fascisms are destined to collide — and probably explode.
And that is the most damning indictment of America’s failed model of global capitalism yet. Because at this precise moment, the world needs to come together, to solve problems like climate change and mass extinction. But it is being driven further apart — by the fascisms that capitalism has imploded into, as America’s model of global prosperity falls apart.
It was destined to fail. Prosperity based on predation and exploitation never lasts. It always ends in greed, despair, violence, and ruin. Will the 21st century world finally learn the lesson of the collapse of America’s empire, which is taking China and India with it? You, my friend, are the judge of that.
The Megacapitalist Global Economy America Made Is Imploding
Authoritarian-Fascism is Rising Simultaneously in China, India, and America — and What it Should Teach Us For Tomorrow
Here’s a tiny question: is it just a cosmic coincidence that three of the world’s most significant countries — China, India, and America — are all beginning to have various stages of political destabilization and authoritarian collapse? Os there is something more to it? I think it has everything to do with this.
America’s just run a titanic, historic experiment in global capitalism. One that’s failed catastrophically. Nobody, though, really seems to have noticed yet. It should be teaching us a crucial and vital lesson. That America’s model of global megacapitalism — in which India and China were the two most crucial linchpins — failed, because capitalism implodes inevitably into fascism. It should be showing us that we need to think much more clearly about our societies, if we want a future again.
Here was the theory. Following America’s lead, countries like India and China could get rich. All they had to do was trade with America — become parts of its global capitalist economy. And as a result, wealth would bring with it democracy. More capitalism — more freedom, more equality, more democracy.
Here’s the reality. None of that ended up being true. China and India didn’t end up more democratic and equal as they became more capitalist. They became less democratic and equal — to the point that they are now verging on authoritarian-fascist societies. Just like America is.
(And these three countries, my friends, also have three of the world’s biggest militaries. What do you think portends for the future? As their societies and futures come undone? Let’s start with now.)
Let’s start with India. There, a kind of hypernationalist fervor has taken hold, based on religious chauvinism. The idea of a secular, liberal India is dying — and the idea of India as a cleansed land of the pure is ascendant. “Hindu nationalism”, some call it. Let us speak more plainly. India is having a kind of theofascist collapse. The Promised Land, which belongs only to the pure — and they rule it absolutely. None of this is theoretical in the slightest. Journalists are harassed and intimidated, dissidents are jailed, the norms of culture and society have shifted rapidly, the tone and message of public discourse has altered radically. How can a secular democracy coexist with the norms of authoritarian-fascism? Obviously, it can’t.
Then there’s China. There, a kind of strange technologically enabled authoritarianism has risen. Technology is used to crack down on people, to stifle dissent, not just to surveil, but to enforce. Want to use that train? Want to enter that mall? You’d better have a good Social Credit Score. But that’s hardly. A million people are reported to have been detained in China’s “re-education camps.” The internet, of course, is watched carefully, and censored. We might call all this techno-fascism.
(Then, of course, there’s America. Camps, raids, Gestapos…Jews warning en masse of rising fascism…a media and thinking class utterly oblivious to it…a political opposition that appeases instead of opposes…hence, supremacist massacres, abuses of power, hate, dehumanization, and violations of basic rights are now everyday realities Americans simply shrug impotently at).
Wait…wasn’t capitalism supposed to bring freedom and democracy with it? Isn’t that what every American thinker, economist, pundit, politician argued? Isn’t it why America bombed half the world for capitalism’s sake? So…what happened?
Here’s what’s really happening. Capitalism’s imploding into fascism. And now it’s going global. The global economy America built is falling like dominoes. Bang, bang, bang.
It’s not a coincidence that China and India are imploding into different kinds of authoritarian-fascism shortly after America did. It is a relationship. China and India were the linchpins of America’s model of global capitalism. They are the two countries that bought into it most heavily after America.And now, my friends, they are paying the price: they are collapsing right along with it.
Let me explain how. It’s very straightforward. You don’t need to be an economist to understand it.
The capitalist global economy that America built was premised on a very simple idea. The American “consumer” was at the heart of the system. He or she receives the lowest price possible — by any means necessary. That’s all people need to live, not healthcare, retirement, education, and so forth — including the ones making the stuff cheap for the American consumer. Along the way, profits are mega-maximized for capitalists, too, because they pay people a pittance, and build huge monopolies. And with greater profits — don’t ask how, because American economists and pundits have never explained — comes more freedom and democracy.
You can see, perhaps, already, how poorly thought out this system was.
In this system, China was the key supplier of material goods, and India the key supplier of services. Walmart was nothing in the 80s, and then in the 90s and 00s, it grew to prominence and power, largely by becoming a Chinese trading outpost, cramming giant warehouses with ultra cheap Chinese goods. America’s technology and finance industries grew wealthy, too, by “outsourcing” programming and whatnot to India.
Now, there were three Big Problems with America’s model of global capitalism, meaning American consumers bought stuff made cheap by Chinese and Indians.
First, this system depended on exploiting people. Not Americans — Indians and Chinese. They were able to make things much more cheaply precisely because they didn’t have the rights and protections of people in advanced countries. So Chinese teenagers made iPhones living in company dorms — making a tiny, tiny fraction of what those iPhones were worth, while Apple piled up billions, then became the world’s first trillion dollar company. Indians and Chinese were exploited in classic terms: never paid a fair share, their rights stunted and eroded. How could democracy ever emerge from that? Wouldn’t the result just be inequality and despair and rage?
Second, this system wasn’t self sustaining. The point was to give “the American consumer” ultra cheap stuff, by exploiting half the world or so. But then who was then going to give him or her a job? If Chinese and Indians were making all the stuff Americans consumed…then what exactly would Americans do? How would American incomes ever rise again? They could hardly make the stuff Chinese and Indians consumed…because those people were still too poor to afford much.
The result was that the American economy had a hidden collapse, an invisible depression. Decent jobs dried. Entire industries vanished. As a consequence, the middle class shrunk to a minority for the first time ever in the history of a rich country. Today, the only growing jobs in the American economy are being neo-servants to the super rich: their butlers, chauffeurs, maids, cleaners, nannies, barbers.
Is all this beginning to make a little sense yet? Let me put more sharply.
The result of America’s model of global capitalism was grimly predictable, to anyone who thinks clearly about capitalism. Capital’s share of income would rise — while labour’s share of income would peak, stagnate, and then fall. And that’s exactly what happened — because that’s what capitalism does. In America’s labour’s share of income peaked in the 1970s. In China and India, it peaked in the 00s, and has been falling ever since.
What would happen, though, when labour’s share of income stagnated and fell long enough, while capital’s share skyrocketed? What kind of social discontents and upheavals would that ignite? Nobody in the thinking class asked. They were too busy gazing adoringly at the new religion they’d created, reciting its articles of faith. Meanwhile, the reality was this.
America’s model of global capitalism was rewarding capitalists far, far more than the average prole — whom it was leaving exploited, politically, economically, and socially, leaving their societies ever less democratic, sophisticated, bereft of public goods, hollowed out culturally, status competition and envy and resentment ascendant.
But capitalists are a tiny number of people in society. As a result, a new class of mega-rich emerged. The Chinese tourists whose families owned entire state industries, that would be seen shopping in Barney’s or Harrods…places largely empty of Americans or Brits. The Indian tycoons who built entire skyscrapers to live in — having owned the “outsourcing” platforms that made the American economy go. And so forth. This tiny new class of ultra-rich were in fact the winners of America’s model of global capitalism. But everyone else, more or less, wasn’t winning nearly enough to call this global economy a success. China and India got their own Kardashians and Trumps — while never improving very much, really, on any measure of human rights, democracy, the rule of law, equality, or freedom.
So. Three Big Problems. One, exploitation of India and China’s poor. Two, impoverishment and implosion of the American middle class. Three, the emergence of a class of ultra-rich, who took the lion’s share gains from the other two. You could put the results like this: India and China traded capitalism for democracy. Just like America did. Contrary to the theory, capitalism didn’t bring democracy with it — it eroded and corroded it. It’s norms, values, rules, codes, incentives, structures.
Now, it’s important to note that it didn’t have to be this way. India and China could, for example, have joined the EU’s sphere of influence, trading with it, culturally linking with it, following its lead. They chose to become mini-Americas, to join America’s global economic system, to become the engines of America’s stock market growth and so forth, instead. Their choice — a fatal and ruinous one. They chose to become capitalist societies instead of social democracies. But capitalism implodes. Hence, India and China at this juncture in history.
American economists and pundits and politicians have never been the sharpest tools in the shed — so even when these problems were pointed out, they were dismissed. The first problem — Chinese and Indians being exploited to make stuff artificially cheaply for Americans — was imagined away as “the growth of the Asian and Chinese middle class.” It’s true that middle classes grew — but in a misshapen, bent kind of way. Not into true middle classes — a social entity with protections, rights, security, stability, safety. But into entities of despair, rage, and frustration. No matter how much richer those new “middle classes” got, they could never afford to keep up with the cost of living, which was pushed ever higher. These were fake middle classes, counterfeits of the real thing.
What happens when people are exploited? Well, sooner or later, they rebel against their failed systems. They search for a source of strength and pride. They begin to blame anyone different for their problems — never quite being able to make ends meet, anxiety, despair, insecurity, the fears of being left behind of never being rich enough to feel safe. And that’s exactly what happened. An aggressive techno-fascism rose in China. A chauvinist theofascism is rising in India. And in America, of course, fascism has already built camps and tortures little kids in them, while Americans watch, sullen, silent, defeated.
And yet these three events are far from disconnected. It’s not a coincidence that the linchpins of the global economy America built, America’s most significant economic partners, are facing political destabilization and authoritarian upheaval — just like America is. It’s a relationship. Capitalism implodes into fascism, by way of inequality, despair, greed, precarity — as labour’s share of income stagnates, but capital’s skyrockets. A society turns to hate and violence to expel the rage which has come to consume it. All the classic ills of capitalism emerged in all three of these societies — and those classic ills, from economic inequality to financial speculation to psychological narcissism to structural insecurity to socioeconomic precarity — implode into fascism.
Let me say it again, because it matters that we all understand it right about now. Capitalism implodes into fascism, as capital’s share of incomes skyrockets, but labour’s stagnates and falls. “Capital” is a tiny number of people — but labour is everyone else. No society can persist or endure when just a tiny few are growing unimaginably rich — and everyone else is forever struggling. Fascisms and authoritarians rise in the vacuum left behind. rises But that’s what America’s model of global capitalism was always going to lead to.
This is the true end of American empire. And it is going to be an ugly and violent thing. You see, here’s a disturbing fact: these three countries also have the largest militaries in the world. But there’s not room for three fascisms in one world. There’s only room for one. And so these now competing fascisms are destined to collide — and probably explode.
And that is the most damning indictment of America’s failed model of global capitalism yet. Because at this precise moment, the world needs to come together, to solve problems like climate change and mass extinction. But it is being driven further apart — by the fascisms that capitalism has imploded into, as America’s model of global prosperity falls apart.
It was destined to fail. Prosperity based on predation and exploitation never lasts. It always ends in greed, despair, violence, and ruin. Will the 21st century world finally learn the lesson of the collapse of America’s empire, which is taking China and India with it? You, my friend, are the judge of that.
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
SC195-3
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/middle-class-death-spiral-consumers-have-never-been-in-more-debt-and-bankruptcies-are-surging
Middle Class Death Spiral: Consumers Have Never Been In More Debt, And Bankruptcies Are Surging
This wasn’t supposed to happen. During the relative economic stability of the past few years, the middle class was supposed to experience a resurgence, but instead it has just continued to be hollowed out. The cost of living has risen much faster than wages have, and as a result hard working families all over America are being stretched financially like never before. Even though most of us are working, 59 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck, and almost 50 million Americans are living in poverty. In a desperate attempt to continue their middle class lifestyles, many Americans have been piling up mountains of debt, and it has gotten to the point where we have a major crisis on our hands.
According to the New York Post, the total amount of debt that U.S. households have accumulated is about to cross the 14 trillion dollar mark for the first time ever…
Meanwhile, record American household debt, near $14 trillion including mortgages and student loans, is some $1 trillion higher than during the Great Recession of 2008. Credit card debt of $1 trillion also exceeds the 2008 peak.
Americans are spending heavily, again — and often recklessly, say analysts.
This is the exact opposite of what U.S. consumers should be doing. We can see signs of a fresh economic slowdown all around us, and consumers should be feverishly trying to get out of debt as fast as they can.
But instead, debt levels just keep setting record after record. In fact, total student loan debt just hit a brand new record high of 1.605 trillion dollars, and auto loan debt just hit a brand new record high of 1.174 trillion dollars.
It would be one thing if we could handle all of this debt, but that isn’t the case. Bankruptcies have been steadily rising, and according to the latest figures the number of bankruptcy filings shot up another 5 percent in the month of July…
Bankruptcy petitions for consumers and businesses are on the rise. There was a 5% increase in total bankruptcy filings in July 2019 from the previous month, the American Bankruptcy Institute said this week. There were 64,283 bankruptcy filings, up from 62,241 for the same period last year.
Unfortunately, this is probably just the beginning.
Right now, most of the country is living on the edge financially, and so a major economic slowdown would inevitably cause another enormous tsunami of consumer bankruptcies like we saw in 2008.
Even now, things are already so bad that many hard working “middle class” workers in high-cost cities such as New York are so financially stretched that they have to rely on free food from local food banks…
“In high-cost cities like New York, personal incomes are not often enough to pay the household bills,” Zac Hall, vice president of anti-poverty programs at the Food Bank For New York City, told The Post. “We are seeing people using consumer debt as a way to make ends meet when they come here,” he added, citing the pressures his nonprofit faces to keep up the distribution of food and meals at no cost to some 1.5 million New Yorkers.
If 1.5 million people in New York are being fed by food banks now while things are still relatively stable, how bad will things be when the economy really starts to tank?
For decades, the “almighty U.S. consumer” was one of the fundamental pillars of our economy, but now that is no longer true.
U.S. consumers simply do not have a lot of discretionary income to spend these days, and this is killing major retailers all over the nation. We are on pace to absolutely shatter the all-time record for store closings in a single year, and within the past 7 days more big retailers have announced that they will be permanently shutting down stores.
For example, Walgreens just announced that they will be closing “approximately 200 U.S. stores”…
Walgreens plans to close approximately 200 U.S. stores, the company announced Tuesday in an SEC filing.
According to the document posted Tuesday on the Securities and Exchange Commission website, the move to close stores follows “a review of the real estate footprint in the United States.”
That wouldn’t be happening if the U.S. economy really was “booming”.
Here is another example that comes to us from Wolf Street…
A’Gaci, a young women’s fashion retailer based in Texas, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday, for the second time, after having filed for the first time in January 2018. This time, it will liquidate. All its remaining 54 stores in seven states and Puerto Rico will be closed – the “bulk” of them by the end of this month.
In addition, we just learned that Party City is going to be closing more stores than expected in 2019…
Party City is increasing the number of stores expected to shutter this year.
The New Jersey-based party supplies company said it was looking to close 55 stores throughout the year, up 10 from the May estimate of 45 stores.
I honestly don’t know what malls and shopping centers all over the U.S. are going to do. I once warned of a future in which America’s landscape would be littered with abandoned stores, and that future has now arrived.
For the moment, those at the very top of the economic pyramid are still doing okay, but the middle class is eroding a little bit more with each passing day. For much more on this, I would encourage you to check out this Youtube video by Jeremiah Babe.
I have been writing about the evisceration of the U.S. middle class for a decade, and the condition of the middle class right now is as bad as I have ever seen it.
And as we plunge into this new economic downturn, things are only going to get worse. The middle class is absolutely drowning in debt, and even a mild recession would be enough to financially wipe out millions of American families.
....
Debt and Credit can increase without limits. Resources that make all of our lives possible are finite. The world's colossal debt and credit binges are attempts to, for a time, try and compensate for a permanent condition of decline. Collapse of the system will be the result. Debt or credit will not fix the multiple dire trends facing too many humans on a finite planet of declining resources/ecosystems.
Middle Class Death Spiral: Consumers Have Never Been In More Debt, And Bankruptcies Are Surging
This wasn’t supposed to happen. During the relative economic stability of the past few years, the middle class was supposed to experience a resurgence, but instead it has just continued to be hollowed out. The cost of living has risen much faster than wages have, and as a result hard working families all over America are being stretched financially like never before. Even though most of us are working, 59 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck, and almost 50 million Americans are living in poverty. In a desperate attempt to continue their middle class lifestyles, many Americans have been piling up mountains of debt, and it has gotten to the point where we have a major crisis on our hands.
According to the New York Post, the total amount of debt that U.S. households have accumulated is about to cross the 14 trillion dollar mark for the first time ever…
Meanwhile, record American household debt, near $14 trillion including mortgages and student loans, is some $1 trillion higher than during the Great Recession of 2008. Credit card debt of $1 trillion also exceeds the 2008 peak.
Americans are spending heavily, again — and often recklessly, say analysts.
This is the exact opposite of what U.S. consumers should be doing. We can see signs of a fresh economic slowdown all around us, and consumers should be feverishly trying to get out of debt as fast as they can.
But instead, debt levels just keep setting record after record. In fact, total student loan debt just hit a brand new record high of 1.605 trillion dollars, and auto loan debt just hit a brand new record high of 1.174 trillion dollars.
It would be one thing if we could handle all of this debt, but that isn’t the case. Bankruptcies have been steadily rising, and according to the latest figures the number of bankruptcy filings shot up another 5 percent in the month of July…
Bankruptcy petitions for consumers and businesses are on the rise. There was a 5% increase in total bankruptcy filings in July 2019 from the previous month, the American Bankruptcy Institute said this week. There were 64,283 bankruptcy filings, up from 62,241 for the same period last year.
Unfortunately, this is probably just the beginning.
Right now, most of the country is living on the edge financially, and so a major economic slowdown would inevitably cause another enormous tsunami of consumer bankruptcies like we saw in 2008.
Even now, things are already so bad that many hard working “middle class” workers in high-cost cities such as New York are so financially stretched that they have to rely on free food from local food banks…
“In high-cost cities like New York, personal incomes are not often enough to pay the household bills,” Zac Hall, vice president of anti-poverty programs at the Food Bank For New York City, told The Post. “We are seeing people using consumer debt as a way to make ends meet when they come here,” he added, citing the pressures his nonprofit faces to keep up the distribution of food and meals at no cost to some 1.5 million New Yorkers.
If 1.5 million people in New York are being fed by food banks now while things are still relatively stable, how bad will things be when the economy really starts to tank?
For decades, the “almighty U.S. consumer” was one of the fundamental pillars of our economy, but now that is no longer true.
U.S. consumers simply do not have a lot of discretionary income to spend these days, and this is killing major retailers all over the nation. We are on pace to absolutely shatter the all-time record for store closings in a single year, and within the past 7 days more big retailers have announced that they will be permanently shutting down stores.
For example, Walgreens just announced that they will be closing “approximately 200 U.S. stores”…
Walgreens plans to close approximately 200 U.S. stores, the company announced Tuesday in an SEC filing.
According to the document posted Tuesday on the Securities and Exchange Commission website, the move to close stores follows “a review of the real estate footprint in the United States.”
That wouldn’t be happening if the U.S. economy really was “booming”.
Here is another example that comes to us from Wolf Street…
A’Gaci, a young women’s fashion retailer based in Texas, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday, for the second time, after having filed for the first time in January 2018. This time, it will liquidate. All its remaining 54 stores in seven states and Puerto Rico will be closed – the “bulk” of them by the end of this month.
In addition, we just learned that Party City is going to be closing more stores than expected in 2019…
Party City is increasing the number of stores expected to shutter this year.
The New Jersey-based party supplies company said it was looking to close 55 stores throughout the year, up 10 from the May estimate of 45 stores.
I honestly don’t know what malls and shopping centers all over the U.S. are going to do. I once warned of a future in which America’s landscape would be littered with abandoned stores, and that future has now arrived.
For the moment, those at the very top of the economic pyramid are still doing okay, but the middle class is eroding a little bit more with each passing day. For much more on this, I would encourage you to check out this Youtube video by Jeremiah Babe.
I have been writing about the evisceration of the U.S. middle class for a decade, and the condition of the middle class right now is as bad as I have ever seen it.
And as we plunge into this new economic downturn, things are only going to get worse. The middle class is absolutely drowning in debt, and even a mild recession would be enough to financially wipe out millions of American families.
....
Debt and Credit can increase without limits. Resources that make all of our lives possible are finite. The world's colossal debt and credit binges are attempts to, for a time, try and compensate for a permanent condition of decline. Collapse of the system will be the result. Debt or credit will not fix the multiple dire trends facing too many humans on a finite planet of declining resources/ecosystems.
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
SC195-2
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/fear-vs-fear/
Fear vs. Fear
The old rules of politics no longer apply. The only language understood by Donald Trump and his coterie of con artists, billionaires, generals, misfits and Christian fascists—and a Democratic Party that has sold us out—is fear. Calling out Trump’s lies and racism does not matter. Calling out his nepotism and corruption does not matter. Calling out the criminality of his administration does not matter. Calling out its incompetence and idiocy does not matter. Calling out the abject subservience of the ruling elites to corporate power does not matter. Trump and his Democratic Party opponents are immune to moral suasion. The more we engage in this empty kabuki theater with its predictable outlandish outbursts, usually from Trump, and predictable outraged responses, usually from Democrats, the more certain are government paralysis and corporate tyranny. The drivel and invective that passes for political discourse is a giant hamster wheel that goes nowhere. It masks the root causes of our political and economic decline and fractures the population into warring camps that increasingly communicate through violence, which is why the United States has suffered mass shootings with three or more fatalities more than 30 times this year.
We will save ourselves only by pitting power against power. And since our two major political parties slavishly serve corporate power, and have few substantial differences on nearly all major issues from imperialism to unfettered capitalism, we must start from scratch. The political personalities, including those on the left such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar and Elizabeth Warren, are distractions. They have no power within the Democratic Party, as Nancy Pelosi often reminds us. They serve to reduce politics to personal feuds, the currency of the vast reality show perpetrated for profit by corporate media. The daily back and forth by these personalities diverts our attention from the rapid consolidation of wealth and power by the ruling elites, the degradation of the ecosystem into a toxic wasteland and the eradication of basic freedoms and rights. The American political system is not salvageable. It will be overthrown in a mass uprising—a version of which we saw recently in Puerto Rico—or vast swaths of the globe will become uninhabitable and the rich will feed like ghouls off the mounting human misery. These are the two stark options. And we have very little time left.
The Democrats, if they had a functioning political party and were not owned and managed by corporations, could easily displace Trump and demolish the Republican Party in electoral landslide after landslide. From poll after poll, as Charles Derber points out in his book “Welcome to the Revolution,” we know what the majority of Americans want. A whooping 82% think wealthy people have too much power and influence in Washington, with 70% singling out large businesses as having too much power. Nearly 80% support stronger rules and enforcement of regulations on the financial industry. Nearly half of Americans think economic inequality is “very big,” and 34% concede it is “moderately big.” Almost 60% of registered voters and 51% of registered Republicans favor raising to $18,000 from $14,820 the maximum amount that workers can make and still be eligible for the earned income tax credit. A staggering 96% of Americans, including 96% of Republicans, believe money in politics is to blame for the dysfunction of the American system. Close to 80% believe wealthy Americans should pay higher taxes. Nearly 60% favor raising the federal minimum wage requirement to $12 an hour. Sixty-one percent, including 42% of Republicans, approve of labor unions. Sixty percent of Americans think “[i]t is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare,” and 60% of registered voters favor “expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American.” Nearly 60% favor free early-childhood education, and 76% are “very concerned” about climate disruption. Eighty-four percent support requiring background checks for all gun buyers. Fifty-eight percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
A genuine populism and New Deal socialism are the only hope of thwarting the rise of neofascist movements. This, however, will never be permitted by the Democratic Party hierarchy, led by figures such as Pelosi, Joe Biden and Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who are acutely aware they would instantly lose their power without the prop of hundreds of millions of corporate dollars. They, and their corporate sponsors, will block all reform even if it means another four years of Trump and the extinguishing of democracy. The only thing they have to sell us is fear—fear of Trump and the Russians. While Trump sells the fear of immigrants, Muslims, people of color and those he brands as socialists. This is a toxic diet.
The greatest traitors in America are not Trump and his neofascist minions shouting “Lock her up” or “Send her home,” but a decadent, morally bankrupt, self-identified liberal elite consumed by greed. They orchestrated the social inequality that permits Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the American population. They pay lip service to the climate crisis but have not done anything to halt the sixth great mass extinction. The fossil fuel industry, under the Democrats and Republicans, continues to pump carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The polar ice caps disappear. The sea levels rise. The deforestation expands. The clogging of the oceans with floating islands of plastic that poisons our food chain is unchecked. No one among the ruling elites has any intention of restraining a bloated, out-of-control military that consumes half of all discretionary spending while half the country lives in poverty or near poverty, the federal deficit looks set to exceed $1 trillion by the end of this fiscal year and the nation’s infrastructure disintegrates.
All meaningful resistance takes place outside the formal political structures. The 10-day protest in April in London led by Extinction Rebellion—which saw 1,130 people arrested as crowds repeatedly shut down major parts of the city in demonstrating against the failure of the ruling elites to confront the climate catastrophe—is what we must emulate. Extinction Rebellion has called for a strike by workers around the world in October, a strike in which thousands of arrests are anticipated.
We have exceeded the 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 that climate scientists said was the level at which we still might have thwarted societal collapse. Last July was the hottest in recorded history. We are currently at 415 ppm of CO2, with enough heat in the system to ensure 450 ppm of CO2 within a decade. A temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-Industrial Age measurement guarantees catastrophic climate disruptions.
“We’re looking at the collapse of the world’s agriculture systems,” Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, told me when we spoke in London. “Long before the sea level rises, we’re going to have a world economic collapse because we’re not going to be able to feed ourselves. That’s what’s shitting everyone. That’s why people are in a panic. In the U.N., in academia, in the elites, they’re looking at this. They’re pulling their hair out. We have this repressed media space so it’s not obvious to everyone. I think this is the role of Extinction Rebellion—to break through that repression. Once you break through it, people will say, yeah. The whole thing is beyond bad.”
“We need to insulate all housing stock,” he said. “We need to turn over the economy so that it’s completely electrified. We need to have all the energy coming from renewables. We need a social transformation, so the rich are taxed and pay their fair share. We need to organize communities around quality of life so that people can learn to adapt to these changes, these traumatic changes. This is a matter of physics. It’s not a matter of political opinion. These changes are coming. It’s far too late for massive increases in temperature not to happen. What we’re looking at now is whether we’re going to go extinct or not. I know that sounds like science fiction, but it’s true. We need to look at the figures. It’s like going to the doctor. This is cancer. You don’t like it, that’s fine, but it’s not going to stop you from dying. The only option is do you want to accept that this is the situation? Or don’t you? If you don’t, you’re going to die. If you do, there is a chance. But you’re going to have to get a move on it.”
“We’re saying this to everyone in society, not just to progressives,” he said. “Wake up! At the end of the day, we’ve all got kids. We’ve all got young people we know. If we have any empathy or responsibility for the young generation, it’s all hands on deck. The most civilized way of dealing with the situation is to come together as a country, as a world, in citizen assemblies, and allow the ordinary people of the world to decide what to do. After all, it’s their lives.”
By stepping outside the system, including in our voting patterns, we begin to make the ruling elites afraid. Change comes from pressure. But if we are not willingly to become outcasts, that pressure will never happen. It was not the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, for example, led by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, that first proposed the Green New Deal. It was articulated 12 years ago by the Green Party, which called for massive job and public works programs to transition our energy infrastructure to renewable energy. The deal was promoted by Howie Hawkins when he ran for the governorship in New York in 2014 and by Jill Stein during her 2016 presidential run.
The proposal for a Green New Deal by the Green Party has a fundamental difference from what is touted by progressive Democrats. It does not argue that structural change and a transition to renewable energy will come by making alliances with corporate power. Instead, it insists that we bring about a transformational change in our economy by crushing corporate power and establishing a socialist system.
“The Democrats don’t have real solutions,” Hawkins, who is seeking the Green Party nomination for the presidency, told me in New York. “Trump is a racist scapegoater. He is a freeloading leech who doesn’t pay his own employees, contracts, taxes. He lies to the people. He needs to go. But if you replace him with a Democrat, they’re not going to enact ‘Medicare for All.’ They’re not going to do a Green New Deal. They are backing Trump, who now wants a war for oil in Venezuela, while the planet is burning from burning oil. It’s madness.”
“The historic role of third parties in this country is to raise issues that major parties won’t take up,” he went on. “Like the Liberty Party and the question of slavery. They were the abolitionists when the Whigs and the Democrats didn’t want to touch the issue. We can go for 150 years of history and show how that’s the case.”
“We are not going to get to 100 percent clean energy if Exxon gets to reinvest its earnings in more oil exploration extraction and sales,” he said. “The Koch brothers and all their interests in the oil industry, those should be publicly owned. We take the earnings, because we’ll use fossil fuels during the transition, and reinvest it in renewable. That’s the socialist solution. You can get some socialist programs, like Social Security or Medicare for All, which Bernie Sanders champions, but as long as the capitalist oligarchy has power based on their concentrated ownership of the economy, which translates into political power, they can roll it back.”
“When I talk about a Green New Deal, I’m talking about an economic bill of rights like [Franklin] Roosevelt called for at the end of his 1944 State of the Union address,” Hawkins said. “A job. Income. Health care. Housing. Education. The civil rights picked that up with the [1963] March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with the Freedom Budget, and the [1968] Poor People’s Campaign. But we still don’t have it. The other part is 100 percent clean energy by 2030. We have to reorganize all sectors [of the economy]—agriculture, manufacturing, the military, transportation—toward sustainability. Or we’ll never get to 100 percent clean energy.”
Switch off the electronic images. Ignore the media burlesque. The endless political shows, which turn presidential campaigns into mind-numbing, two-year-long marathons, are entertainment. Do not trust anyone in power. We will save ourselves by building mass movements to overthrow corporate power. I am not certain we will succeed. But I am certain that if we fail, we are doomed.
....
Coal, Oil and Gas supplies worldwide have peaked and are entering decline. The complex world economies will follow this downtrend into increasing contraction. All alternative energy will never be scaled up to anything close to a level that could mitigate societies downfall due to diminishing hydrocarbon availability. Mass unrest/protest will become more prevalent and human migrations will grow ever larger as peoples lives fall apart and they try to seek better conditions. All of the ongoing converging catastrophes, myriad in scope, will overwhelm human systems with compounding negative impacts. The growing conflicts between the masses and the elites will become ever more brutal.
Fear vs. Fear
The old rules of politics no longer apply. The only language understood by Donald Trump and his coterie of con artists, billionaires, generals, misfits and Christian fascists—and a Democratic Party that has sold us out—is fear. Calling out Trump’s lies and racism does not matter. Calling out his nepotism and corruption does not matter. Calling out the criminality of his administration does not matter. Calling out its incompetence and idiocy does not matter. Calling out the abject subservience of the ruling elites to corporate power does not matter. Trump and his Democratic Party opponents are immune to moral suasion. The more we engage in this empty kabuki theater with its predictable outlandish outbursts, usually from Trump, and predictable outraged responses, usually from Democrats, the more certain are government paralysis and corporate tyranny. The drivel and invective that passes for political discourse is a giant hamster wheel that goes nowhere. It masks the root causes of our political and economic decline and fractures the population into warring camps that increasingly communicate through violence, which is why the United States has suffered mass shootings with three or more fatalities more than 30 times this year.
We will save ourselves only by pitting power against power. And since our two major political parties slavishly serve corporate power, and have few substantial differences on nearly all major issues from imperialism to unfettered capitalism, we must start from scratch. The political personalities, including those on the left such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar and Elizabeth Warren, are distractions. They have no power within the Democratic Party, as Nancy Pelosi often reminds us. They serve to reduce politics to personal feuds, the currency of the vast reality show perpetrated for profit by corporate media. The daily back and forth by these personalities diverts our attention from the rapid consolidation of wealth and power by the ruling elites, the degradation of the ecosystem into a toxic wasteland and the eradication of basic freedoms and rights. The American political system is not salvageable. It will be overthrown in a mass uprising—a version of which we saw recently in Puerto Rico—or vast swaths of the globe will become uninhabitable and the rich will feed like ghouls off the mounting human misery. These are the two stark options. And we have very little time left.
The Democrats, if they had a functioning political party and were not owned and managed by corporations, could easily displace Trump and demolish the Republican Party in electoral landslide after landslide. From poll after poll, as Charles Derber points out in his book “Welcome to the Revolution,” we know what the majority of Americans want. A whooping 82% think wealthy people have too much power and influence in Washington, with 70% singling out large businesses as having too much power. Nearly 80% support stronger rules and enforcement of regulations on the financial industry. Nearly half of Americans think economic inequality is “very big,” and 34% concede it is “moderately big.” Almost 60% of registered voters and 51% of registered Republicans favor raising to $18,000 from $14,820 the maximum amount that workers can make and still be eligible for the earned income tax credit. A staggering 96% of Americans, including 96% of Republicans, believe money in politics is to blame for the dysfunction of the American system. Close to 80% believe wealthy Americans should pay higher taxes. Nearly 60% favor raising the federal minimum wage requirement to $12 an hour. Sixty-one percent, including 42% of Republicans, approve of labor unions. Sixty percent of Americans think “[i]t is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare,” and 60% of registered voters favor “expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American.” Nearly 60% favor free early-childhood education, and 76% are “very concerned” about climate disruption. Eighty-four percent support requiring background checks for all gun buyers. Fifty-eight percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
A genuine populism and New Deal socialism are the only hope of thwarting the rise of neofascist movements. This, however, will never be permitted by the Democratic Party hierarchy, led by figures such as Pelosi, Joe Biden and Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who are acutely aware they would instantly lose their power without the prop of hundreds of millions of corporate dollars. They, and their corporate sponsors, will block all reform even if it means another four years of Trump and the extinguishing of democracy. The only thing they have to sell us is fear—fear of Trump and the Russians. While Trump sells the fear of immigrants, Muslims, people of color and those he brands as socialists. This is a toxic diet.
The greatest traitors in America are not Trump and his neofascist minions shouting “Lock her up” or “Send her home,” but a decadent, morally bankrupt, self-identified liberal elite consumed by greed. They orchestrated the social inequality that permits Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to control more wealth than the bottom 50% of the American population. They pay lip service to the climate crisis but have not done anything to halt the sixth great mass extinction. The fossil fuel industry, under the Democrats and Republicans, continues to pump carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The polar ice caps disappear. The sea levels rise. The deforestation expands. The clogging of the oceans with floating islands of plastic that poisons our food chain is unchecked. No one among the ruling elites has any intention of restraining a bloated, out-of-control military that consumes half of all discretionary spending while half the country lives in poverty or near poverty, the federal deficit looks set to exceed $1 trillion by the end of this fiscal year and the nation’s infrastructure disintegrates.
All meaningful resistance takes place outside the formal political structures. The 10-day protest in April in London led by Extinction Rebellion—which saw 1,130 people arrested as crowds repeatedly shut down major parts of the city in demonstrating against the failure of the ruling elites to confront the climate catastrophe—is what we must emulate. Extinction Rebellion has called for a strike by workers around the world in October, a strike in which thousands of arrests are anticipated.
We have exceeded the 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 that climate scientists said was the level at which we still might have thwarted societal collapse. Last July was the hottest in recorded history. We are currently at 415 ppm of CO2, with enough heat in the system to ensure 450 ppm of CO2 within a decade. A temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-Industrial Age measurement guarantees catastrophic climate disruptions.
“We’re looking at the collapse of the world’s agriculture systems,” Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, told me when we spoke in London. “Long before the sea level rises, we’re going to have a world economic collapse because we’re not going to be able to feed ourselves. That’s what’s shitting everyone. That’s why people are in a panic. In the U.N., in academia, in the elites, they’re looking at this. They’re pulling their hair out. We have this repressed media space so it’s not obvious to everyone. I think this is the role of Extinction Rebellion—to break through that repression. Once you break through it, people will say, yeah. The whole thing is beyond bad.”
“We need to insulate all housing stock,” he said. “We need to turn over the economy so that it’s completely electrified. We need to have all the energy coming from renewables. We need a social transformation, so the rich are taxed and pay their fair share. We need to organize communities around quality of life so that people can learn to adapt to these changes, these traumatic changes. This is a matter of physics. It’s not a matter of political opinion. These changes are coming. It’s far too late for massive increases in temperature not to happen. What we’re looking at now is whether we’re going to go extinct or not. I know that sounds like science fiction, but it’s true. We need to look at the figures. It’s like going to the doctor. This is cancer. You don’t like it, that’s fine, but it’s not going to stop you from dying. The only option is do you want to accept that this is the situation? Or don’t you? If you don’t, you’re going to die. If you do, there is a chance. But you’re going to have to get a move on it.”
“We’re saying this to everyone in society, not just to progressives,” he said. “Wake up! At the end of the day, we’ve all got kids. We’ve all got young people we know. If we have any empathy or responsibility for the young generation, it’s all hands on deck. The most civilized way of dealing with the situation is to come together as a country, as a world, in citizen assemblies, and allow the ordinary people of the world to decide what to do. After all, it’s their lives.”
By stepping outside the system, including in our voting patterns, we begin to make the ruling elites afraid. Change comes from pressure. But if we are not willingly to become outcasts, that pressure will never happen. It was not the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, for example, led by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, that first proposed the Green New Deal. It was articulated 12 years ago by the Green Party, which called for massive job and public works programs to transition our energy infrastructure to renewable energy. The deal was promoted by Howie Hawkins when he ran for the governorship in New York in 2014 and by Jill Stein during her 2016 presidential run.
The proposal for a Green New Deal by the Green Party has a fundamental difference from what is touted by progressive Democrats. It does not argue that structural change and a transition to renewable energy will come by making alliances with corporate power. Instead, it insists that we bring about a transformational change in our economy by crushing corporate power and establishing a socialist system.
“The Democrats don’t have real solutions,” Hawkins, who is seeking the Green Party nomination for the presidency, told me in New York. “Trump is a racist scapegoater. He is a freeloading leech who doesn’t pay his own employees, contracts, taxes. He lies to the people. He needs to go. But if you replace him with a Democrat, they’re not going to enact ‘Medicare for All.’ They’re not going to do a Green New Deal. They are backing Trump, who now wants a war for oil in Venezuela, while the planet is burning from burning oil. It’s madness.”
“The historic role of third parties in this country is to raise issues that major parties won’t take up,” he went on. “Like the Liberty Party and the question of slavery. They were the abolitionists when the Whigs and the Democrats didn’t want to touch the issue. We can go for 150 years of history and show how that’s the case.”
“We are not going to get to 100 percent clean energy if Exxon gets to reinvest its earnings in more oil exploration extraction and sales,” he said. “The Koch brothers and all their interests in the oil industry, those should be publicly owned. We take the earnings, because we’ll use fossil fuels during the transition, and reinvest it in renewable. That’s the socialist solution. You can get some socialist programs, like Social Security or Medicare for All, which Bernie Sanders champions, but as long as the capitalist oligarchy has power based on their concentrated ownership of the economy, which translates into political power, they can roll it back.”
“When I talk about a Green New Deal, I’m talking about an economic bill of rights like [Franklin] Roosevelt called for at the end of his 1944 State of the Union address,” Hawkins said. “A job. Income. Health care. Housing. Education. The civil rights picked that up with the [1963] March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with the Freedom Budget, and the [1968] Poor People’s Campaign. But we still don’t have it. The other part is 100 percent clean energy by 2030. We have to reorganize all sectors [of the economy]—agriculture, manufacturing, the military, transportation—toward sustainability. Or we’ll never get to 100 percent clean energy.”
Switch off the electronic images. Ignore the media burlesque. The endless political shows, which turn presidential campaigns into mind-numbing, two-year-long marathons, are entertainment. Do not trust anyone in power. We will save ourselves by building mass movements to overthrow corporate power. I am not certain we will succeed. But I am certain that if we fail, we are doomed.
....
Coal, Oil and Gas supplies worldwide have peaked and are entering decline. The complex world economies will follow this downtrend into increasing contraction. All alternative energy will never be scaled up to anything close to a level that could mitigate societies downfall due to diminishing hydrocarbon availability. Mass unrest/protest will become more prevalent and human migrations will grow ever larger as peoples lives fall apart and they try to seek better conditions. All of the ongoing converging catastrophes, myriad in scope, will overwhelm human systems with compounding negative impacts. The growing conflicts between the masses and the elites will become ever more brutal.
Monday, August 12, 2019
SC195-1
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52079.htm
Criminal Embargos: Venezuela and Iran in the Crosshairs of Murderers Inc – Who is Next?
Imagine just for a moment, the World would stand up in unison, sick and tired of the aggressive killer arrogance of the United States and her vassals – and their joint war-force called NATO – and this World, our World, what’s left of it when you deduct Washington and its Brussels allies, would at once block every shipment of everything destined for the ports of the United States of America; every sea port, airport and road port. Hermetically. Nothing would enter. Nothing, no food, no medicine, no electronics, no cars – no nothing. And nothing could leave. No exports, no petrol, no grains, no meat, no pharmaceuticals and foremost, no weapons. Nothing.
And now, take your mind a step further – and imagine the same – exactly the same, a total and full blockage of Israel – nothing would enter, no food, no fuel, no medication, no machinery and especially no weapons – and nothing would leave; a full and total blockage.
This would of course be totally illegal; illegal and unacceptable, by any international law, by the standards of the UN Charter, by the Human Rights Laws and Directives – by any ethical values of human morals. Wouldn’t it? – Yet, this is exactly what these countries are doing, have been doing for decades, sanctioning to strangle and murder entire populations into death or submission. The US with Cuba; Israel with Palestine. And the coercion and strangulation go on, unabated.
The longest embargo – illegal, inhuman and outright criminal – Washington imposed on Cuba – 60 years. Because Cuba has chosen socialism as her form of state and government. Cuba survived and will never give in to the tyrant of the north.
Now the US is expanding her palette of killing by impunity to dominate and subjugate nation after nation which they do not consider bending sufficiently to the dictate of their masters. Venezuela has been targeted for two decades, ever since former President Hugo Chavez was democratically elected in 1998; and Iran, ever since the US-imposed Shah was deposed in 1979 – exactly 40 years ago – by Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Both Venezuela and Iran are rich in natural resources, especially hydrocarbons but also in gold, rare earths and other precious metals and stones.
Contrary to what one would like to imagine, international world bodies, like the United Nations and her sister and associated organizations remain just about silent. When a high-level official utters some benign criticism of the US or Israel – it flairs up for a moment in the ‘news’, then it disappears again, as if it never happened. And indeed, nothing happens. They – the US and Israel – go on with their crimes with impunity.
The latest is an open declaration of economic warfare by Washington, a total embargo on Venezuela; the embargo is now being turned into a naval blockade. Similar steps are to be taken for Iran. That literally means that no merchandise – no matter how vital for survival, like food and medication, is allowed into Venezuela. Three days ago, the US seized, totally illegally, a cargo ship attempting to deliver food and medication to Venezuela – in the Panama Canal, territory which the US does not own or control anymore.
The ship was carrying soy cakes, from which Venezuela was to produce food. Never mind, that the cargoes are fully paid for by Venezuela. And this seems to be just the beginning. Vessels leaving Venezuela with petrol deliveries to client countries are also targeted for blockage, thus confiscating, or rather stealing, Venezuela’s main source of income on which she intends to survive and feed and provide health care for her people. This, in addition to the more than 130 billion dollars total Venezuelan assets confiscated – stolen – by the US worldwide.
And nobody says beep. Almost. Yes, there are some collective protests by countries in solidarity – like key members of the Sao Paulo Forum, as well as more than 60 members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM – total 120 members) that have become especially active in recent years in defense of Venezuela within the United Nations. Protests and protest declarations also take place by ALBA members, a Latin American trade alliance (ALBA – Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, 11 members [Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Ecuador, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, Grenada and the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis]).
But most interesting are the hypocrites, those who write and scream that Venezuelans are starving to death, that the Maduro government neglects its people – yet these accusers-in-falsehood – let the US and her vassals strangle Venezuela and steal her foreign assets, including foreign reserves and gold, food and medical imports – they are saying zilch, nada, nothing. Just watching.
To top it all off, the Human Rights Commissioner, Madame Michelle Bachelet, Hypocrite-in-chief, who recently visited Venezuela, at the invitation of President Nicolas Maduro, on a Human Rights mission, and who delivered a devastating report about Venezuela’s HR, full of lies, half-truths and outright omissions, not mentioning with one word the US inspired coup attempts, the US-funded opposition and its bloody atrocities perpetrated on the Chavista population, and the strangulating and starving by the US and US-dictated European sanctions – Madame Bachelet now came forward condemning the naval blockade. Great. But she did not stand up against the deadly embargo by the US and the European Union. – What credibility remains for the Human Rights Commission? – The world can see it – it’s all bought, coerced into submission, like so many other UN agencies by the Murderers Inc.
If we are not careful, they are soon going to rule the globe. Thank god, for Russia and China – which are also subjects of US-EU sanctioning and targeted for take-over. But they are a tiny little bit too big and too strong for this sort of games by the decaying US empire and her obedient rats on the sinking ship.
Similarly, the European Union – despots as they have been for hundreds of years as colonialists in Africa, Asia and Latin America – and continue in a modern colonial role through economic control of much of Africa – this very EU, has been sanctioning Venezuela for years on the orders of Washington, naturally, who else? – Now they condemn the naval blockade, but continue their routine sanctions regime.
According to a study carried out by the Washington DC based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), under guidance of Mark Weisbrot, CEPR co-director and Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor, Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, New York, US and EU sanctions have cost some 40,000 Venezuelan lives. This mainly since August 2017, when Washington escalated its unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela and her state oil company, PDVSA, cutting them off international financial markets.
Yes, the world would have plenty of reasons to stand up and dish out similar naval and air blockades against the US and Israel. Just as a teaser to begin with, and if that doesn’t send a strong enough wake-up message, perhaps such embargoes should be considered on a longer-term indefinite scale. It’s illegal. But we are living in a world where international laws don’t count – where laws are made, as we go, by the self-declared hegemon, the US of A, and her symbiotic Middle East ally, Israel. – So, why not nudging the legal, moral and ethical order back into balance?
Criminal Embargos: Venezuela and Iran in the Crosshairs of Murderers Inc – Who is Next?
Imagine just for a moment, the World would stand up in unison, sick and tired of the aggressive killer arrogance of the United States and her vassals – and their joint war-force called NATO – and this World, our World, what’s left of it when you deduct Washington and its Brussels allies, would at once block every shipment of everything destined for the ports of the United States of America; every sea port, airport and road port. Hermetically. Nothing would enter. Nothing, no food, no medicine, no electronics, no cars – no nothing. And nothing could leave. No exports, no petrol, no grains, no meat, no pharmaceuticals and foremost, no weapons. Nothing.
And now, take your mind a step further – and imagine the same – exactly the same, a total and full blockage of Israel – nothing would enter, no food, no fuel, no medication, no machinery and especially no weapons – and nothing would leave; a full and total blockage.
This would of course be totally illegal; illegal and unacceptable, by any international law, by the standards of the UN Charter, by the Human Rights Laws and Directives – by any ethical values of human morals. Wouldn’t it? – Yet, this is exactly what these countries are doing, have been doing for decades, sanctioning to strangle and murder entire populations into death or submission. The US with Cuba; Israel with Palestine. And the coercion and strangulation go on, unabated.
The longest embargo – illegal, inhuman and outright criminal – Washington imposed on Cuba – 60 years. Because Cuba has chosen socialism as her form of state and government. Cuba survived and will never give in to the tyrant of the north.
Now the US is expanding her palette of killing by impunity to dominate and subjugate nation after nation which they do not consider bending sufficiently to the dictate of their masters. Venezuela has been targeted for two decades, ever since former President Hugo Chavez was democratically elected in 1998; and Iran, ever since the US-imposed Shah was deposed in 1979 – exactly 40 years ago – by Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Both Venezuela and Iran are rich in natural resources, especially hydrocarbons but also in gold, rare earths and other precious metals and stones.
Contrary to what one would like to imagine, international world bodies, like the United Nations and her sister and associated organizations remain just about silent. When a high-level official utters some benign criticism of the US or Israel – it flairs up for a moment in the ‘news’, then it disappears again, as if it never happened. And indeed, nothing happens. They – the US and Israel – go on with their crimes with impunity.
The latest is an open declaration of economic warfare by Washington, a total embargo on Venezuela; the embargo is now being turned into a naval blockade. Similar steps are to be taken for Iran. That literally means that no merchandise – no matter how vital for survival, like food and medication, is allowed into Venezuela. Three days ago, the US seized, totally illegally, a cargo ship attempting to deliver food and medication to Venezuela – in the Panama Canal, territory which the US does not own or control anymore.
The ship was carrying soy cakes, from which Venezuela was to produce food. Never mind, that the cargoes are fully paid for by Venezuela. And this seems to be just the beginning. Vessels leaving Venezuela with petrol deliveries to client countries are also targeted for blockage, thus confiscating, or rather stealing, Venezuela’s main source of income on which she intends to survive and feed and provide health care for her people. This, in addition to the more than 130 billion dollars total Venezuelan assets confiscated – stolen – by the US worldwide.
And nobody says beep. Almost. Yes, there are some collective protests by countries in solidarity – like key members of the Sao Paulo Forum, as well as more than 60 members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM – total 120 members) that have become especially active in recent years in defense of Venezuela within the United Nations. Protests and protest declarations also take place by ALBA members, a Latin American trade alliance (ALBA – Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, 11 members [Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Ecuador, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, Grenada and the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis]).
But most interesting are the hypocrites, those who write and scream that Venezuelans are starving to death, that the Maduro government neglects its people – yet these accusers-in-falsehood – let the US and her vassals strangle Venezuela and steal her foreign assets, including foreign reserves and gold, food and medical imports – they are saying zilch, nada, nothing. Just watching.
To top it all off, the Human Rights Commissioner, Madame Michelle Bachelet, Hypocrite-in-chief, who recently visited Venezuela, at the invitation of President Nicolas Maduro, on a Human Rights mission, and who delivered a devastating report about Venezuela’s HR, full of lies, half-truths and outright omissions, not mentioning with one word the US inspired coup attempts, the US-funded opposition and its bloody atrocities perpetrated on the Chavista population, and the strangulating and starving by the US and US-dictated European sanctions – Madame Bachelet now came forward condemning the naval blockade. Great. But she did not stand up against the deadly embargo by the US and the European Union. – What credibility remains for the Human Rights Commission? – The world can see it – it’s all bought, coerced into submission, like so many other UN agencies by the Murderers Inc.
If we are not careful, they are soon going to rule the globe. Thank god, for Russia and China – which are also subjects of US-EU sanctioning and targeted for take-over. But they are a tiny little bit too big and too strong for this sort of games by the decaying US empire and her obedient rats on the sinking ship.
Similarly, the European Union – despots as they have been for hundreds of years as colonialists in Africa, Asia and Latin America – and continue in a modern colonial role through economic control of much of Africa – this very EU, has been sanctioning Venezuela for years on the orders of Washington, naturally, who else? – Now they condemn the naval blockade, but continue their routine sanctions regime.
According to a study carried out by the Washington DC based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), under guidance of Mark Weisbrot, CEPR co-director and Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor, Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, New York, US and EU sanctions have cost some 40,000 Venezuelan lives. This mainly since August 2017, when Washington escalated its unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela and her state oil company, PDVSA, cutting them off international financial markets.
Yes, the world would have plenty of reasons to stand up and dish out similar naval and air blockades against the US and Israel. Just as a teaser to begin with, and if that doesn’t send a strong enough wake-up message, perhaps such embargoes should be considered on a longer-term indefinite scale. It’s illegal. But we are living in a world where international laws don’t count – where laws are made, as we go, by the self-declared hegemon, the US of A, and her symbiotic Middle East ally, Israel. – So, why not nudging the legal, moral and ethical order back into balance?
Sunday, August 11, 2019
SC194-15
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52082.htm
Bodies on The Ground And The Rise And Rise Of The Economic Elite
The US is less of a nation than a collective, psychotic episode.
Within day to day life in the nation, a cultural aura exists that shifts, mingles, and merges between a sense of nervous agitation and displaced rage, in combination with a sense of weightlessness. The fragmented quality of daily life imparts an insubstantial, unreal quality wherein the citizenry of the capitalist/consumer empire of hungry ghosts drift through a nadascape comprised of ad hoc, fast-buck-driven, suburban/exburban architecture and the ersatz eros of constant, consumer come-ons.
Yet beneath the nebulous dread and nettling angst of it all, there exists the primal human imperative for connection and social communion i.e., authentic eros. The most lost among the lost in the ghostsphere of the collective mind attempt to animate the realm of shades with libations of blood. The gods of the capitalist death cult demand no less.
Where does an impulse to possess an unlimited number of firearms fit into the scheme of things? A firearm’s heft, for one. The weapon feel substantial when held and hoisted thus serves, provisionally, to mitigate a psychical sense of weightlessness. The act of engagement eases nervous agitation. Guns reality is antithetically to the weightless content of media reality. Focus is achieved when one aligns the weapon’s site to a target. Nebulous dread transforms into adamantine purpose. The presence of an Angel Of Death will focus the mind. The ground, for the moment, feels solid beneath one’s feet. Hence, there arrives a craving, in the sense of addiction, to hoard the object that provides relief; in addition, massive quantities of ammunition must be stored as emotional ballast. The mystifying, rankling, uncontrollable criteria of this weightless Age and the white noise of uncertainty seem to yield to the clear and decisive crack of a rifle shot. Relief is imagined in the concomitant carnage. Rebecca West captures the phenomenon in prose:
“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
―Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Because we, on a personal level, in most cases, choose the primary option, our hidden, shadow half will live out the latter on a collective basis. During the blood lust on display at Trump rallies, the mob finds a collective comfort zone in catastrophic longings. The domestic landscape of paranoia works in behalf of the profiteers of perpetual war, perpetrators of the U.S.-created deathscapes overseas, and vice versa, in a self-resonating feedback loop of carnage.
In our era, in which, the US empire is in decline, as a consequence, the White supremacist order no longer seems inevitable, Trump’s frightened legions have personalised the decline. In their gut, they feel as if their identity is under siege. Seal off the nation’s borders. Construct an unscalable wall. Create a cordon sanitaire to protect and preserve racial purity. A strong authority figure is craved in order to set the world back in order. The phenomenon could be termed, Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS) -- a pathology manifested in personality types who have been traumatized by the authoritarianism of the US socio-political milieu but who seek to assuage their hurt and humiliation by identification with the very forces responsible for their torment.. The stuff of a cultural nervous breakdown.
To that end, according to its own laws, the nation's citizenry, sufferers of mental distress, should be restricted from purchasing a gun. Yet without a doubt, the most disturbed of all are the nation’s political class, those responsible for gun legislation. There is compelling evidence that they present a clear and present danger to themselves and others. The political class is a menace to society; they make decisions, more often than not, based on delusional thinking, that are responsible for harm on a massive scale. Thus they should be subject to institutional-style restraint, within the confines of the most heavily secure, lockdown ward in an asylum for the criminally insane.
Although the so-called mentally ill, as a rule, are not any more inclined to commit violent crimes than are the general population of capitalist dystopias. The US nation was founded in genocidal violence and the fortunes of its ruling class’ are protected by the state sanctioned violence of the police and are bloated by the violence inherent to imperialist shakedown operations.
It comes down to this: In our emotionally brutal era, those deemed mentally ill are suffering from capitalism. The pummelling stress and boot-in-the-face, hierarchy-inflicted humiliations inherent to the system inflict trauma on large swathes of the citizenry.
Epidemic levels of middle age, US citizen’s are dying with needles in their arms. The inherent and internalised White supremacy of the societal order has been exacerbated by Trump’s self-serving, reckless agitprop and acts in a drug-like manner causing dopamine levels to rise in those experiencing emotional torment due to humiliation-caused despair. Demagogues such as Trump are aware and exploit the manner despair can be palliatively mitigated by the emotional displacement of rage.
Fascist insignias rise when the hopes and aspirations of the working class lay shattered across a capitalist economic wasteland. Hoisted torches provide the illusion that dark despair has been banished. The fascist mob becomes possessed by a belief that they, en masse, can ascend into the precincts of heaven by scaling a mountain of corpses comprised of outsider groups.
Fascism not only acts as anaesthetic to the wounds delivered by capitalism, it is a psychoactive drug because incantatory rhetoric and imagist psychical material get those susceptible to its crude allure high.
Capitalism is borne on manic wings. The economic elite move from corporate skyscrapers and high rise rooftops in order to travel by helicopter, where upon landing, they board private, luxury jets, then, whereupon landing again, they are transported by helicopter to corporate skyscrapers and high rise rooftops. Touching the earth is a fleeting experience. The ruling class have lost touch with ground level verities. In a classical sense, such displays of hubris were understood as the progenitor of madness. The gods first elevate those they drive mad.
And, yes, race-based fears and animus are in play. Racism engendered mass murder has been coming to pass since armed Europeans trudged ashore in the Americas, with their blood-sodden religion and their murderous craving for gold and land. Of course, the racist demagoguery of the Bloated Orange Tub Of Nazi Goo oozing into and agitating the limbic systems of violent cretins during homegrown Nuremberg Rallies and his compulsion to blitzkrieg the pixel-sphere with Der Stürmer tweets is fomenting racist mayhem that includes bacchanals of blood. US mythos is rancid with the reek of the corpses of the innocent slaughtered by White men brandishing firearms. Mass murderers have been and continue to be enshrined as heroes, from Wounded Knee to Afghanistan.
The nation was established by gun-enabled genocide and the intimidation of African slaves held at gunpoint on capitalist plantations. The truth has never been faced e.g., the suppression of the Nixon tape in which Ronald Reagan displayed his racist mindset.
The US citizenry thanks the soldiers of its racist wars of aggression for their “service.” Perpetual shooting sprees origins can be traced to the heart of darkness of the nation and its concomitant White supremacist creed. The killings happened long before the rise and election of the Tangerine Tweet Führer. Of course, the racist shit-heel Trump has exacerbated the situation. He deserves all scorn cast his way. It is obvious his capacity for malice does not possess a governor’s switch.
Trump is a two-legged emblem of the hypertrophy at play in late US imperium. Gun-inflicted violence is steeped into the blood-stained fabric of the US (sham) republic. Withal, Trump is not an anomaly; he is an emblem. Gun-strokers are no more going to shed their mythos than liberals and progressives are going to shed theirs that the US is a democratic republic, governed by the rule of law, and progressive reforms will be implemented by its High Dollar owned and controlled political class that will serve to turn around the trajectory of the blood-built and maintained US empire.
Bodies on The Ground And The Rise And Rise Of The Economic Elite
The US is less of a nation than a collective, psychotic episode.
Within day to day life in the nation, a cultural aura exists that shifts, mingles, and merges between a sense of nervous agitation and displaced rage, in combination with a sense of weightlessness. The fragmented quality of daily life imparts an insubstantial, unreal quality wherein the citizenry of the capitalist/consumer empire of hungry ghosts drift through a nadascape comprised of ad hoc, fast-buck-driven, suburban/exburban architecture and the ersatz eros of constant, consumer come-ons.
Yet beneath the nebulous dread and nettling angst of it all, there exists the primal human imperative for connection and social communion i.e., authentic eros. The most lost among the lost in the ghostsphere of the collective mind attempt to animate the realm of shades with libations of blood. The gods of the capitalist death cult demand no less.
Where does an impulse to possess an unlimited number of firearms fit into the scheme of things? A firearm’s heft, for one. The weapon feel substantial when held and hoisted thus serves, provisionally, to mitigate a psychical sense of weightlessness. The act of engagement eases nervous agitation. Guns reality is antithetically to the weightless content of media reality. Focus is achieved when one aligns the weapon’s site to a target. Nebulous dread transforms into adamantine purpose. The presence of an Angel Of Death will focus the mind. The ground, for the moment, feels solid beneath one’s feet. Hence, there arrives a craving, in the sense of addiction, to hoard the object that provides relief; in addition, massive quantities of ammunition must be stored as emotional ballast. The mystifying, rankling, uncontrollable criteria of this weightless Age and the white noise of uncertainty seem to yield to the clear and decisive crack of a rifle shot. Relief is imagined in the concomitant carnage. Rebecca West captures the phenomenon in prose:
“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
―Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Because we, on a personal level, in most cases, choose the primary option, our hidden, shadow half will live out the latter on a collective basis. During the blood lust on display at Trump rallies, the mob finds a collective comfort zone in catastrophic longings. The domestic landscape of paranoia works in behalf of the profiteers of perpetual war, perpetrators of the U.S.-created deathscapes overseas, and vice versa, in a self-resonating feedback loop of carnage.
In our era, in which, the US empire is in decline, as a consequence, the White supremacist order no longer seems inevitable, Trump’s frightened legions have personalised the decline. In their gut, they feel as if their identity is under siege. Seal off the nation’s borders. Construct an unscalable wall. Create a cordon sanitaire to protect and preserve racial purity. A strong authority figure is craved in order to set the world back in order. The phenomenon could be termed, Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS) -- a pathology manifested in personality types who have been traumatized by the authoritarianism of the US socio-political milieu but who seek to assuage their hurt and humiliation by identification with the very forces responsible for their torment.. The stuff of a cultural nervous breakdown.
To that end, according to its own laws, the nation's citizenry, sufferers of mental distress, should be restricted from purchasing a gun. Yet without a doubt, the most disturbed of all are the nation’s political class, those responsible for gun legislation. There is compelling evidence that they present a clear and present danger to themselves and others. The political class is a menace to society; they make decisions, more often than not, based on delusional thinking, that are responsible for harm on a massive scale. Thus they should be subject to institutional-style restraint, within the confines of the most heavily secure, lockdown ward in an asylum for the criminally insane.
Although the so-called mentally ill, as a rule, are not any more inclined to commit violent crimes than are the general population of capitalist dystopias. The US nation was founded in genocidal violence and the fortunes of its ruling class’ are protected by the state sanctioned violence of the police and are bloated by the violence inherent to imperialist shakedown operations.
It comes down to this: In our emotionally brutal era, those deemed mentally ill are suffering from capitalism. The pummelling stress and boot-in-the-face, hierarchy-inflicted humiliations inherent to the system inflict trauma on large swathes of the citizenry.
Epidemic levels of middle age, US citizen’s are dying with needles in their arms. The inherent and internalised White supremacy of the societal order has been exacerbated by Trump’s self-serving, reckless agitprop and acts in a drug-like manner causing dopamine levels to rise in those experiencing emotional torment due to humiliation-caused despair. Demagogues such as Trump are aware and exploit the manner despair can be palliatively mitigated by the emotional displacement of rage.
Fascist insignias rise when the hopes and aspirations of the working class lay shattered across a capitalist economic wasteland. Hoisted torches provide the illusion that dark despair has been banished. The fascist mob becomes possessed by a belief that they, en masse, can ascend into the precincts of heaven by scaling a mountain of corpses comprised of outsider groups.
Fascism not only acts as anaesthetic to the wounds delivered by capitalism, it is a psychoactive drug because incantatory rhetoric and imagist psychical material get those susceptible to its crude allure high.
Capitalism is borne on manic wings. The economic elite move from corporate skyscrapers and high rise rooftops in order to travel by helicopter, where upon landing, they board private, luxury jets, then, whereupon landing again, they are transported by helicopter to corporate skyscrapers and high rise rooftops. Touching the earth is a fleeting experience. The ruling class have lost touch with ground level verities. In a classical sense, such displays of hubris were understood as the progenitor of madness. The gods first elevate those they drive mad.
And, yes, race-based fears and animus are in play. Racism engendered mass murder has been coming to pass since armed Europeans trudged ashore in the Americas, with their blood-sodden religion and their murderous craving for gold and land. Of course, the racist demagoguery of the Bloated Orange Tub Of Nazi Goo oozing into and agitating the limbic systems of violent cretins during homegrown Nuremberg Rallies and his compulsion to blitzkrieg the pixel-sphere with Der Stürmer tweets is fomenting racist mayhem that includes bacchanals of blood. US mythos is rancid with the reek of the corpses of the innocent slaughtered by White men brandishing firearms. Mass murderers have been and continue to be enshrined as heroes, from Wounded Knee to Afghanistan.
The nation was established by gun-enabled genocide and the intimidation of African slaves held at gunpoint on capitalist plantations. The truth has never been faced e.g., the suppression of the Nixon tape in which Ronald Reagan displayed his racist mindset.
The US citizenry thanks the soldiers of its racist wars of aggression for their “service.” Perpetual shooting sprees origins can be traced to the heart of darkness of the nation and its concomitant White supremacist creed. The killings happened long before the rise and election of the Tangerine Tweet Führer. Of course, the racist shit-heel Trump has exacerbated the situation. He deserves all scorn cast his way. It is obvious his capacity for malice does not possess a governor’s switch.
Trump is a two-legged emblem of the hypertrophy at play in late US imperium. Gun-inflicted violence is steeped into the blood-stained fabric of the US (sham) republic. Withal, Trump is not an anomaly; he is an emblem. Gun-strokers are no more going to shed their mythos than liberals and progressives are going to shed theirs that the US is a democratic republic, governed by the rule of law, and progressive reforms will be implemented by its High Dollar owned and controlled political class that will serve to turn around the trajectory of the blood-built and maintained US empire.
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