https://www.globalresearch.ca/crimes-against-humanity-us-sanctions-harm-one-third-of-worlds-people/5696794
Crimes against Humanity: US Sanctions Harm One Third of World’s People
The most insidious and pervasive form of modern warfare by Wall Street and the Pentagon, acting in coordination, is passing largely unnoticed and unchallenged. This calculated attack is rolling back decades of progress in health care, sanitation, housing, essential infrastructure and industrial development all around the world.
Almost every developing country attempting any level of social programs for its population is being targeted.
U.S. imperialism and its junior partners have refined economic strangulation into a devastating weapon. Sanctions in the hands of the dominant military and economic powers now cause more deaths than bombs or guns. This weapon is stunting the growth of millions of youth and driving desperate migrations, dislocating tens of millions.
‘A crime against humanity’
Sanctions and economic blockades against Venezuela, Cuba and Iran are well known. But the devastating impacts of U.S. sanctions on occupied Palestine — or on already impoverished countries such as Mali, Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Kyrgyzstan, Fiji, Nicaragua and Laos — are not even on the radar screen of human rights groups.
Most sanctions are intentionally hidden; they don’t generate even a line of news. Some sanctions are quickly passed after a sudden news article about an alleged atrocity. The civilians who will suffer have nothing to do with whatever crime the corporate media use as an excuse. What are never mentioned are the economic or political concessions the U.S. government or corporations are seeking.
Sanctions cannot be posed as an alternative to war. They are in fact the most brutal form of warfare, deliberately targeting the most defenseless civilians — youth, the elderly, sick and disabled people. In a period of human history when hunger and disease are scientifically solvable, depriving hundreds of millions from getting basic necessities is a crime against humanity.
International law and conventions, including the Geneva and Nuremberg Conventions, United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, explicitly prohibit the targeting of defenseless civilians, especially in times of war.
Sanctions draw condemnation
Modern industrial society is built on a fragile web of essential technology. If pumps and sewage lines, elevators and generators can’t function due to lack of simple spare parts, entire cities can be overwhelmed by swamps. If farmers are denied seed, fertilizer, field equipment and storage facilities, and if food, medicine and essential equipment are deliberately denied, an entire country is at risk.
The Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, Samuel Moncada, spoke to the XVIII Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement held in Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct. 26. Addressing the 120 countries represented, he denounced the imposition of arbitrary measures, called “sanctions” by the U.S., as “economic terrorism which affects a third of humanity with more than 8,000 measures in 39 countries.”
This terrorism, he said, constitutes a “threat to the entire system of international relations and is the greatest violation of human rights in the world.” (tinyurl.com/uwlm99r)
The Group of 77 and China, an international body based at the U.N. and representing 134 developing countries, called upon “the international community to condemn and reject the imposition of the use of such measures as a means of political and economic coercion against developing countries.”
The Group explained:
“The criminal, anti-human policy of targeting defenseless populations, which is in clear violation of United Nations Charter and international law, has now become the new weapon of choice for these powerful states since they are faced with strong opposition from the majority of their own population to the endless wars of occupation that they are already involved in.”
The power of banks
The mechanism and the ability of one country or one vote to destroy a country on the other side of the world are not well understood.
International capital uses the dollar system. All international transactions go through U.S. banks. These banks are in a position to block money transfers for the smallest transaction and to confiscate billions of dollars held by targeted governments and individuals. They are also in a position to demand that every other bank accept sudden restrictions imposed from Washington or face sanctions themselves.
This is similar to how the U.S. Navy can claim the authority to intercept ships and interrupt trade anywhere, or the U.S. Army can target people with drones and invade countries without even asking for a declaration of war.
Sometimes a corporate media outlet, a U.S.-funded “human rights” group or a financial institution issues charges, often unsubstantiated, of human rights violations, or political repression, drug trafficking, terrorist funding, money laundering, cyber-security infractions, corruption or non-compliance with an international financial institution. These charges become the opening wedge for a demand for sanctions as punishment.
Sanctions can be imposed through a U.S. Congressional resolution or Presidential declaration or be authorized by a U.S. government agency, such as the departments of the Treasury, Commerce, State or Defense. The U.S. might apply pressure to get support from the European Union, the U.N. Security Council or one of countless U.S.-established regional security organizations, such as the Organization of American States.
A U.S. corporate body that wants a more favorable trade deal is able to influence numerous agencies or politicians to act on its behalf. Deep-state secret agencies, military contractors, nongovernmental organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, and numerous corporate-funded foundations maneuver to create economic dislocation and pressure resource-rich countries.
Even sanctions that appear mild and limited can have a devastating impact. U.S. officials will claim that some sanctions are only military sanctions, needed to block weapons sales. But under the category of possible “dual use,” the bans include chlorine needed to purify water, pesticides, fertilizers, medical equipment, simple batteries and spare parts of any kind.
Another subterfuge is sanctions that supposedly apply only to government officials or specific agencies. But in fact any and every transaction they carry out can be blocked while endless inquiries are held. Anonymous bank officials can freeze all transactions in progress and scrutinize all accounts a country holds. Any form of sanctions, even against individuals, raises the cost and risk level for credit and loans.
There are more than 6,300 names on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List of individuals sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the U.S. Treasury Department.
The OFAC describes its role this way:
“OFAC administers a number of different sanctions programs. The sanctions can be either comprehensive or selective, using the blocking of assets and trade restrictions to accomplish foreign policy and national security goals.”
There is also a Financial Action Task Force list and an International Traffic in Arms Regulations list.
The sanctions weapon has become so extensive that there is now a whole body of law to guide U.S. corporations and banks in navigating sales, credit and loans. It is intended to be opaque, murky and open to interpretation, payoffs and subterfuge. There seems to be no single online site that lists all the different countries and individuals under U.S. sanctions.
Once a country is sanctioned, it must then “negotiate” with various U.S. agencies that demand austerity measures, elections that meet Western approval, cuts in social programs, and other political and economic concessions to get sanctions lifted.
Sanctions are an essential part of U.S. regime change operations, designed in the most cynical way to exact maximum human cost. Sudden hyperinflation, economic disruption and unexpected shortages are then hypocritically blamed on the government in office in the sanctioned country. Officials are labeled inept or corrupt.
Agencies carefully monitor the internal crisis they are creating to determine the optimum time to impose regime change or manufacture a color revolution. The State Department and U.S. covert agencies fund numerous NGOs and social organizations that instigate dissent. These tactics have been used in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, Sudan and many other countries.
A weapon of imperialism in decline
Gone are the days of Marshall Plan-type promises of rebuilding, trade, loans and infrastructure development. They are not even offered in this period of capitalist decay. The sanctions weapon is now such a pervasive instrument that hardly a week goes by without new sanctions, even on past allies.
In October the U.S. threatened harsh sanctions on Turkey, a 70-year member of the U.S.-commanded NATO military alliance.
On Nov. 27, Trump suddenly announced, by presidential decree, harsher sanctions on Nicaragua, calling it a “National Security Threat.” He also declared Mexico a “terrorist” threat and refused to rule out military intervention. Both countries have democratically elected governments.
Other sanctions sail through the U.S. Congress without a roll call vote — just a cheer and a unanimous voice vote, such as the sanctions on Hong Kong in support of U.S.-funded protests.
Why Wall Street can’t be sanctioned
Is there any possibility that the U.S. could be sanctioned for its endless wars under the same provisions by which it has asserted the right to wreak havoc on other countries?
The Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, in November 2017 asked the Hague-based ICC to open formal investigations of war crimes committed by the Taliban, the Haqqani network, Afghan forces, and the U.S. military and the CIA.
The very idea of the U.S. being charged with war crimes led then White House National Security Advisor John Bolton to threaten judges and other ICC officials with arrest and sanction if they even considered any charge against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
“If the court comes after us, Israel or other U.S. allies, we will not sit quietly,” Bolton said. He noted that the U.S. “is prepared to slap financial sanctions and criminal charges on officials of the court if they proceed against any U.S. personnel. … We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. … We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.” (The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2018)
Bolton also cited a recent move by Palestinian leaders to have Israeli officials prosecuted at the ICC for human rights violations. The ICC judges got the message. They ruled that despite “a reasonable basis” to consider war crimes committed in Afghanistan, there was little chance of a successful prosecution. An investigation “would not serve the interests of justice.”
Chief Prosecutor Bensouda, for proposing an even-handed inquiry, had her U.S. visa revoked by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Sanctions are a weapon in the capitalist world order used by the most powerful countries against those that are weaker and developing. One hundred years ago, in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson advocated sanctions as a quiet but lethal weapon that exerts pressure no nation in the modernworld can withstand.
Sanctions demonstrate how capitalist laws protect the right of eight multibillionaires to own more than the population of half the world.
U.N. sanctions demanded by Washington
The U.S., with the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet and 800 military bases, claims — while engaged in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya — that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran are the greatest threats to world peace.
In the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. succeeded in winning harsh new sanctions against Iran and the DPRK by threatening, on the eve of “war games,” that the U.S. would escalate hostilities to an open military attack.
This threat proved sufficient to get other Security Council members to fall in line and either vote for sanctions or abstain.
These strong-arm tactics have succeeded again and again. During the Korean War, when the U.S. military was saturation-bombing Korea, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Warren Austin held up a submachine gun in the Security Council to demand expanded authority in the war from that body.
Throughout the 1990s the U.S. government used sanctions on Iraq as a horrendous social experiment to calculate how to drastically lower caloric intake, destroy crop output and ruin water purification. The impact of these sanctions were widely publicized — as a threat to other countries.
Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, when asked about the half a million children who died as a result of U.S. sanctions on Iraq, replied, “We think the price is worth it.”
The sanctions imposed by the U.S. against Iran are book-length, spanning 40 years since the Iranian Revolution. The blockade and sanctions on Cuba have continued for 60 years.
Sanctions Kill campaign
It is an enormous political challenge to break the media silence and expose this crime. We need to put a human face on the suffering.
Targeted countries cannot be left to struggle by themselves in isolation — there must be full solidarity with their efforts. The sheer number of countries being starved into compliance via U.S.-imposed sanctions must be dragged into the light of day. And one step in challenging the injustice of capitalist property relations is to attack the criminal role of the banks.
The effort to rally world opinion against sanctions as a war crime is beginning with a call for International Days of Action Against Sanctions & Economic War on March 13-15, 2020. Its slogans are “Sanctions Kill! Sanctions Are War! End Sanctions Now!”
These coordinated international demonstrations are a crucial first step. Research and testimony; resolutions by unions, student groups, cultural workers and community organizations; social media campaigns; and bringing medical supplies and international relief to sanctioned countries can all play a role. Every kind of political campaign to expose the international crime of sanctions is a crucial contribution.
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Saturday, December 21, 2019
SC202-13
https://srsroccoreport.com/the-global-debt-ticking-time-bomb-the-reason-to-own-gold-silver/
THE GLOBAL DEBT TICKING TIME-BOMB
As Global Debt reached a new record high of $250 trillion this year, gold and silver came briefly back on the radar for investors. After five long years, the precious metals finally broke through key technical levels this summer. However, after the Fed started the Repo Operations in September and the $60 billion a month of “Not-QE” in October, the focus returned once again to the Bloated Stock and Bond markets.
What a drastic change from the Fed’s policy last year when it was reducing the size of its balance sheet until the stock market crashed in December 2018. Since then, the huge stock market reversal and all the additional gains have been Fed liquidity induced. Sven Heinrich continues to write and talk about this on his website, the Northmantrader.com. Here is a recent chart from his article, System Failure:
At the bottom left hand of the chart corresponds to the bottom of the stock market in January 2019 when Fed Chairman Powell caved in by ending the reduction of the Fed’s balance sheet. Since then, there have been three rate cuts, Repo Magic and $60 billion a month of U.S. Treasury purchases because there aren’t enough suckers to absorb all the new U.S. Govt issued debt.
The U.S. economy isn’t even in a recession, and the Fed is acting as if it was 2008-2009 all over again. What happens when the U.S. economy finally rolls over?? It’s going to be terrible news, especially considering the record amount of global debt. According to the IIF, the Institute of International Finance, global debt reached a record high of $250 trillion in the first half of the year. However, the IIF estimates that global debt will reach $255 trillion by yearend.
In just ten years since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the world added another $100 trillion in debt. Now, the majority of that debt went into the Stock, Bond, and Real Estate Markets. This is precisely why the U.S. stock market has reached an all-time new high. Unfortunately, when the U.S. and the global economy finally enters into a recession-depression, the asset values will crash while the debts remain.
GOD hath a sense of humor.
We saw this happen during the U.S. Subprime Housing Bust. After millions of Americans refinanced their homes by cashing in on the equity, they were upside down with their mortgages when real estate prices plunged. The brutal truth of the market is that the DEBTS will remain while ASSETS evaporate.
In just the first half of 2019, total Global Debt increased by $7.5 trillion. Thus, global debt jumped by more than twice the value of all world gold and silver investment of $3.5 trillion:
According to the World Gold Council, World Silver Survey, and my estimate of additional privately held silver bullion, the total value of global gold investment is $3,450 billion, while silver trails way behind at $90 billion. These figures are based on 2.3 billion ounces of global gold investment and an estimated 5 billion ounces of silver. The World Silver Survey reported that above-ground silver stocks in 2018 were 2.5 billion ounces. I added 2.5 billion oz more of possible private held silver bars and coins. I doubt there is that much privately held silver, but even if we say there was 5 billion oz of silver investment held, it’s only worth $90 billion based on an $18 spot price.
As we can see in the chart above, total global debt will reach $255 trillion by the end of 2019 versus $3.4 trillion worth of gold and $90 billion in silver. Thus, the total world gold investment holdings are only 1.3% of the outstanding global debt, while world silver investment is a measly 2.6% that of gold.
Currently, the massive Global Debt Time-Bomb isn’t impacting the values of the precious metals. This is because the mentality driving the market isn’t considering the FUTURE ENERGY needed to pay back all this debt. We must remember that Debt represents future obligations that can be paid back only when the global economy BURNS ENERGY.
The following chart from Louis Arnoux, based on work from the Hills Group provide the MAIN FACTOR that is pushing the global economic and financial economy to the brink:
This chart is very easy to understand. All one has to know is that as the NET ENERGY from oil delivered to the market (Orange line) has declined, the total World Debt to GDP (Red line) has increased. The data in the chart is a bit old, but the trend continues in the same direction. Based on the total global debt reaching $255 trillion by the end of 2019 and the estimated $88 trillion in world GDP, that equals a World Debt to GDP of 290%, much higher than the 240% shown in the chart. So, as you can see… the world continues to head towards the ENERGY CLIFF....
....We are well past the age-old fundamental analysis of the markets. Its time has come and gone. When the Central banks are no longer able to control the financial system, then the ENERGY CLIFF will take over in glorious 3D Techno-Color… and it won’t be pretty. Virtually, no one is prepared for what’s coming. Sure, we have some time left before DEBT Grim Reaper comes, but it’s not going to be decades away.
I know this because we already see troubling signs in the U.S. Shale Oil Industry.
The U.S. Shale Oil Industry Is Pulling The Energy Cliff Closer
I had a good laugh hearing this quote from the new U.S. Energy Secretary during an interview with Bloomberg about the Shale Industry:
The golden age of U.S. shale is far from over, with an expected slowdown in the Permian Basin likely to be temporary, according to the new U.S. Energy Secretary.
Has the new U.S. Energy Secretary, Dan Brouillette, seen the huge annual decline rates taking place in the industry?? While it was easy to add 2,000-3,000 wells a year to increase production, it now takes nearly 10,000 new wells. When do we start to reach 15,000+ wells a year and when does it become completely insane?? Furthermore, the largest shale oil producer in the U.S., EOG Resources, has one of the highest first-year decline rates in the industry.
For example, according to the excellent data from Shaleprofile.com, EOG’s 831 shale wells completed in 2018 experienced an 82% first-year decline rate:
EOG’s 831 wells reached peak production of 960 barrels of oil per day (bopd) by the second month and then declined 82% to 170 bopd by month 12, or one year. That’s one hell of a first-year decline rate. Why is this interesting?? Well, in 2011, EOG’s wells only declined by 66% in the first year. Sure, EOG’s wells are more powerful today, but if we assume a conservative $6 million a well, the company invested $5 billion to watch 82% of its production evaporate in just one year.
Of course, the “sophisticated” energy analysts will suggest that this is just part of doing business. BULL-CRAPOLA. Let’s look at the Net Energy Chart again:
It doesn’t’ matter how much oil the U.S. Shale Industry produces if the amount of NET ENERGY delivered to the market continues to decline. Shale Oil is a DESTROYER of net energy. So, the more we produce of it, the more debt and more fragile the overall system becomes....
THE GLOBAL DEBT TICKING TIME-BOMB
As Global Debt reached a new record high of $250 trillion this year, gold and silver came briefly back on the radar for investors. After five long years, the precious metals finally broke through key technical levels this summer. However, after the Fed started the Repo Operations in September and the $60 billion a month of “Not-QE” in October, the focus returned once again to the Bloated Stock and Bond markets.
What a drastic change from the Fed’s policy last year when it was reducing the size of its balance sheet until the stock market crashed in December 2018. Since then, the huge stock market reversal and all the additional gains have been Fed liquidity induced. Sven Heinrich continues to write and talk about this on his website, the Northmantrader.com. Here is a recent chart from his article, System Failure:
At the bottom left hand of the chart corresponds to the bottom of the stock market in January 2019 when Fed Chairman Powell caved in by ending the reduction of the Fed’s balance sheet. Since then, there have been three rate cuts, Repo Magic and $60 billion a month of U.S. Treasury purchases because there aren’t enough suckers to absorb all the new U.S. Govt issued debt.
The U.S. economy isn’t even in a recession, and the Fed is acting as if it was 2008-2009 all over again. What happens when the U.S. economy finally rolls over?? It’s going to be terrible news, especially considering the record amount of global debt. According to the IIF, the Institute of International Finance, global debt reached a record high of $250 trillion in the first half of the year. However, the IIF estimates that global debt will reach $255 trillion by yearend.
In just ten years since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the world added another $100 trillion in debt. Now, the majority of that debt went into the Stock, Bond, and Real Estate Markets. This is precisely why the U.S. stock market has reached an all-time new high. Unfortunately, when the U.S. and the global economy finally enters into a recession-depression, the asset values will crash while the debts remain.
GOD hath a sense of humor.
We saw this happen during the U.S. Subprime Housing Bust. After millions of Americans refinanced their homes by cashing in on the equity, they were upside down with their mortgages when real estate prices plunged. The brutal truth of the market is that the DEBTS will remain while ASSETS evaporate.
In just the first half of 2019, total Global Debt increased by $7.5 trillion. Thus, global debt jumped by more than twice the value of all world gold and silver investment of $3.5 trillion:
According to the World Gold Council, World Silver Survey, and my estimate of additional privately held silver bullion, the total value of global gold investment is $3,450 billion, while silver trails way behind at $90 billion. These figures are based on 2.3 billion ounces of global gold investment and an estimated 5 billion ounces of silver. The World Silver Survey reported that above-ground silver stocks in 2018 were 2.5 billion ounces. I added 2.5 billion oz more of possible private held silver bars and coins. I doubt there is that much privately held silver, but even if we say there was 5 billion oz of silver investment held, it’s only worth $90 billion based on an $18 spot price.
As we can see in the chart above, total global debt will reach $255 trillion by the end of 2019 versus $3.4 trillion worth of gold and $90 billion in silver. Thus, the total world gold investment holdings are only 1.3% of the outstanding global debt, while world silver investment is a measly 2.6% that of gold.
Currently, the massive Global Debt Time-Bomb isn’t impacting the values of the precious metals. This is because the mentality driving the market isn’t considering the FUTURE ENERGY needed to pay back all this debt. We must remember that Debt represents future obligations that can be paid back only when the global economy BURNS ENERGY.
The following chart from Louis Arnoux, based on work from the Hills Group provide the MAIN FACTOR that is pushing the global economic and financial economy to the brink:
This chart is very easy to understand. All one has to know is that as the NET ENERGY from oil delivered to the market (Orange line) has declined, the total World Debt to GDP (Red line) has increased. The data in the chart is a bit old, but the trend continues in the same direction. Based on the total global debt reaching $255 trillion by the end of 2019 and the estimated $88 trillion in world GDP, that equals a World Debt to GDP of 290%, much higher than the 240% shown in the chart. So, as you can see… the world continues to head towards the ENERGY CLIFF....
....We are well past the age-old fundamental analysis of the markets. Its time has come and gone. When the Central banks are no longer able to control the financial system, then the ENERGY CLIFF will take over in glorious 3D Techno-Color… and it won’t be pretty. Virtually, no one is prepared for what’s coming. Sure, we have some time left before DEBT Grim Reaper comes, but it’s not going to be decades away.
I know this because we already see troubling signs in the U.S. Shale Oil Industry.
The U.S. Shale Oil Industry Is Pulling The Energy Cliff Closer
I had a good laugh hearing this quote from the new U.S. Energy Secretary during an interview with Bloomberg about the Shale Industry:
The golden age of U.S. shale is far from over, with an expected slowdown in the Permian Basin likely to be temporary, according to the new U.S. Energy Secretary.
Has the new U.S. Energy Secretary, Dan Brouillette, seen the huge annual decline rates taking place in the industry?? While it was easy to add 2,000-3,000 wells a year to increase production, it now takes nearly 10,000 new wells. When do we start to reach 15,000+ wells a year and when does it become completely insane?? Furthermore, the largest shale oil producer in the U.S., EOG Resources, has one of the highest first-year decline rates in the industry.
For example, according to the excellent data from Shaleprofile.com, EOG’s 831 shale wells completed in 2018 experienced an 82% first-year decline rate:
EOG’s 831 wells reached peak production of 960 barrels of oil per day (bopd) by the second month and then declined 82% to 170 bopd by month 12, or one year. That’s one hell of a first-year decline rate. Why is this interesting?? Well, in 2011, EOG’s wells only declined by 66% in the first year. Sure, EOG’s wells are more powerful today, but if we assume a conservative $6 million a well, the company invested $5 billion to watch 82% of its production evaporate in just one year.
Of course, the “sophisticated” energy analysts will suggest that this is just part of doing business. BULL-CRAPOLA. Let’s look at the Net Energy Chart again:
It doesn’t’ matter how much oil the U.S. Shale Industry produces if the amount of NET ENERGY delivered to the market continues to decline. Shale Oil is a DESTROYER of net energy. So, the more we produce of it, the more debt and more fragile the overall system becomes....
Friday, December 20, 2019
SC202-12
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec19/costs-bubbles12-19.html
Skyrocketing Costs Will Pop All the Bubbles
We've used a simple trick to keep the status quo from imploding for the past 11 years: borrow whatever it takes to keep paying the skyrocketing costs for housing, healthcare, college, childcare, government, permanent wars and so on.
The trick has worked because central banks pushed interest rates to zero, lowering the costs of borrowing more as costs continued spiraling higher.
But that trick has been used up. The next step--negative interest rates--has failed to spark the "growth" required to pay for insanely overpriced housing, healthcare, college, childcare, government, etc.
We've reached the end of the line on lowering interest rates as a way of borrowing more to keep our heads above water. We've reached the point where households and enterprises can't even afford the principle payments, i.e. no interest at all.
How are banks supposed to make money at zero interest rates? By charging outrageous overdraft fees and offering marginally qualified borrowers sky-high credit cards, and getting in on the federally guaranteed mortgage/student loan racket, that's how.
The point here is the discipline of rising costs has been destroyed by easy money. Take higher education as an example. If there was no federally backed student loan "industry," universities would have been forced to innovate 20 years ago to lower costs and improve the market value of their "product."
Instead, they left their bloated cost structure untouched as it spiraled ever higher, and simply passed the higher costs onto students, who have had to borrow over $1.5 trillion to feed the bloated higher education cartel.
Borrowing more money to avoid dealing with soaring costs doesn't solve the problem, it adds another problem. With the discipline of living within one's means destroyed, there's no pressure to innovate or make necessary sacrifices. The status quo becomes complacently bloated, lazy, sclerotic, unwilling to change anything fundamental and incapable of making the tiniest sacrifices. Why sacrifice when we can always pass higher costs to somebody who can always borrow more?
Even at near-zero rates, borrowing more runs into a brick wall. Even at zero interest, the principle and other costs of buying and maintaining vehicles, homes, etc. with borrowed money eventually exceeds income, and the borrowers default en masse.
Nobody cares where the taxpayers, renters, buyers or customers get the money; for 26 glorious years, they've somehow come up with the cash to pay the rent that tripled, the healthcare insurance that tripled, the property taxes that tripled, the college tuition that tripled, and so on.
Meanwhile, back in reality, wages have not tripled, they've barely budged for the bottom 90%, and so the widening gap between income--the ability to pay in cash-- and borrowing more to pay on credit has widened to the breaking point.
The most experienced operators are closing shop. As this article notes, the most experienced restaurateurs in Seattle are closing their doors: Seattle's Wage Mandate Kills Restaurants: "I often hear people in Seattle lament that it's becoming 'more corporate.' The truth is that the city has made it nearly impossible for many small businesses to survive." (WSJ.com)
Here's the dynamic: all the vested interests take a ruler and a pencil and they extend the line of higher costs and revenues into the future: so what if the rent on this cramped cafe went from $1,000 a month to $3,000 a month? We can jack it up to $4,000 and then $5,000 a month because the tenants have always managed to pay the higher costs.
Local governments act on the same delusional extension of "growth forever." Small businesses can always pay higher taxes and fees because they've always managed to pay them no matter how much we jack them up.
Small businesses and property owners are viewed as tax donkeys: load them with higher taxes and fees, and they trudge onward without a complaint. The smart money is bailing as fast as they can, and the dumb money remains delusional: customers will happily pay $40 for a plate of chicken because they've always managed to pay the higher costs.
You see the disconnect between stagnant wages and costs that have tripled: you can only fill the widening gap with borrowed money for so long, and then even as zero interest the wage earner can no longer afford to borrow more.
At that point, defaulting on existing debt is either impossible to avoid or the wisest choice. The owners of a cafe who can no longer make the insane rent can't default, so they just walk away. Having been stripped to the bone by sky-high costs, there's nothing left for creditors. As the old saying has it, "you can't get blood from a turnip."
The reckoning is coming, and everyone who counted on "eternal growth of borrowing" to stave off the reckoning is in for a big surprise: revenues will plummet, incomes will plummet, lending will plummet, college enrollments will plummet, and tax receipts will plummet. Defaults will skyrocket, triggering a collapse in debt markets, housing markets and stock markets, all of which are totally dependent on the delusion that we can deal with soaring costs by borrowing more, forever and ever.
The smartest most experienced rats flee the ship at the first sign that "this sucker is going down." The complacent rats who believe that extending the line of "permanent growth" will track reality will lose the opportunity to exit before the panic, and they will pay the price for their delusional complacency.
Skyrocketing Costs Will Pop All the Bubbles
We've used a simple trick to keep the status quo from imploding for the past 11 years: borrow whatever it takes to keep paying the skyrocketing costs for housing, healthcare, college, childcare, government, permanent wars and so on.
The trick has worked because central banks pushed interest rates to zero, lowering the costs of borrowing more as costs continued spiraling higher.
But that trick has been used up. The next step--negative interest rates--has failed to spark the "growth" required to pay for insanely overpriced housing, healthcare, college, childcare, government, etc.
We've reached the end of the line on lowering interest rates as a way of borrowing more to keep our heads above water. We've reached the point where households and enterprises can't even afford the principle payments, i.e. no interest at all.
How are banks supposed to make money at zero interest rates? By charging outrageous overdraft fees and offering marginally qualified borrowers sky-high credit cards, and getting in on the federally guaranteed mortgage/student loan racket, that's how.
The point here is the discipline of rising costs has been destroyed by easy money. Take higher education as an example. If there was no federally backed student loan "industry," universities would have been forced to innovate 20 years ago to lower costs and improve the market value of their "product."
Instead, they left their bloated cost structure untouched as it spiraled ever higher, and simply passed the higher costs onto students, who have had to borrow over $1.5 trillion to feed the bloated higher education cartel.
Borrowing more money to avoid dealing with soaring costs doesn't solve the problem, it adds another problem. With the discipline of living within one's means destroyed, there's no pressure to innovate or make necessary sacrifices. The status quo becomes complacently bloated, lazy, sclerotic, unwilling to change anything fundamental and incapable of making the tiniest sacrifices. Why sacrifice when we can always pass higher costs to somebody who can always borrow more?
Even at near-zero rates, borrowing more runs into a brick wall. Even at zero interest, the principle and other costs of buying and maintaining vehicles, homes, etc. with borrowed money eventually exceeds income, and the borrowers default en masse.
Nobody cares where the taxpayers, renters, buyers or customers get the money; for 26 glorious years, they've somehow come up with the cash to pay the rent that tripled, the healthcare insurance that tripled, the property taxes that tripled, the college tuition that tripled, and so on.
Meanwhile, back in reality, wages have not tripled, they've barely budged for the bottom 90%, and so the widening gap between income--the ability to pay in cash-- and borrowing more to pay on credit has widened to the breaking point.
The most experienced operators are closing shop. As this article notes, the most experienced restaurateurs in Seattle are closing their doors: Seattle's Wage Mandate Kills Restaurants: "I often hear people in Seattle lament that it's becoming 'more corporate.' The truth is that the city has made it nearly impossible for many small businesses to survive." (WSJ.com)
Here's the dynamic: all the vested interests take a ruler and a pencil and they extend the line of higher costs and revenues into the future: so what if the rent on this cramped cafe went from $1,000 a month to $3,000 a month? We can jack it up to $4,000 and then $5,000 a month because the tenants have always managed to pay the higher costs.
Local governments act on the same delusional extension of "growth forever." Small businesses can always pay higher taxes and fees because they've always managed to pay them no matter how much we jack them up.
Small businesses and property owners are viewed as tax donkeys: load them with higher taxes and fees, and they trudge onward without a complaint. The smart money is bailing as fast as they can, and the dumb money remains delusional: customers will happily pay $40 for a plate of chicken because they've always managed to pay the higher costs.
You see the disconnect between stagnant wages and costs that have tripled: you can only fill the widening gap with borrowed money for so long, and then even as zero interest the wage earner can no longer afford to borrow more.
At that point, defaulting on existing debt is either impossible to avoid or the wisest choice. The owners of a cafe who can no longer make the insane rent can't default, so they just walk away. Having been stripped to the bone by sky-high costs, there's nothing left for creditors. As the old saying has it, "you can't get blood from a turnip."
The reckoning is coming, and everyone who counted on "eternal growth of borrowing" to stave off the reckoning is in for a big surprise: revenues will plummet, incomes will plummet, lending will plummet, college enrollments will plummet, and tax receipts will plummet. Defaults will skyrocket, triggering a collapse in debt markets, housing markets and stock markets, all of which are totally dependent on the delusion that we can deal with soaring costs by borrowing more, forever and ever.
The smartest most experienced rats flee the ship at the first sign that "this sucker is going down." The complacent rats who believe that extending the line of "permanent growth" will track reality will lose the opportunity to exit before the panic, and they will pay the price for their delusional complacency.
Thursday, December 19, 2019
SC202-11
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52714.htm
On Rogues and Rogue States
I have just finished reading William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. (This may not fascinate you, but I am coming to something.) I first encountered it in high school. It is of course Shirer’s account as a correspondent in Germany of the rise of the Nazis. Most of it is well known to the educated. The Nazis, who had control over the domestic press, convinced the German population that the Poles were threatening Germany, as plausible as Guatemala threatening the United States. The Poles were said to be committing atrocities against Germans.
Then the Reich, with no justification whatever, having absolute air superiority, attacked Poland, bombing undefended cities and killing huge numbers of people. It was a German pattern several times repeated. Many reporters told of the smell of rotting bodies, of refugees dying of hunger and thirst. Today the Reich is endlessly remembered as a paragon of evil. It was.
How did Nazi Germany differ from the United States today? There is the same lying. Washington insisted that Iraq was about to get nuclear weapons, biological agents, that it had poisonous gas. None of this was true. The government, unimpeded by the media, persuaded over half of the American population that Iraq was responsible for Nine-Eleven. Now it says that Iran works to get nuclear weapons, and of course that the Russians are coming. The American press, informally but strictly controlled, carefully doesn’t challenge any of this.
Having prepped the American public as the Nazis prepped theirs, Washington unleashed a savage attack against Iraq, deliberately destroying infrastructure, leaving the country without power or purified water. The slaughter was godawful. But, said America, the war was to rid the Iraqi people of an evil dictator, to bring them democracy, freedom, and human rights. (The oil was entirely incidental. The oil is always incidental.)
Washington never sleeps in its campaigns to improve the lives of people whose most fervent wish is that America stop improving their lives. To give the Afghans democracy, human rights, and American values, the US has for eighteen years been bombing, bombing, bombing a largely illiterate population in a nation where America has no business. It is a coward’s war with warplanes butchering peasants who have no defenses. The pilots and drone operators who do this deserve contempt, as does the country that sends them. How many more years? For what purpose? And how were the German Nazis different?
The German Gestapo perpetrated sickening torture in hidden basements. America does the same, mainltaining torture prisons around the world. In these, men, and no doubt women, are hung by their wrists for days, naked in very cold rooms, kept awake and periodically beaten (exactly as described by survivors of Soviet torture. Nazis, whether American, Russian, or German, are Nazis.)
Photos of Iraqis at the American torture operation at Abu Ghraib showed prisoners, almost naked, lying in pools of blood. Tell me, please, how this differs from what was done by the Reich? (The bloodier photos are no longer online. Many that remain seem to have been edited.)
Abu Ghraib. A happy American girl soldier. Note rubber gloves. The US military used many female soldiers for this duty. They apparently were kinky, as they seemed to get a kick out of it. A female general ran the operation.
Abu Ghraib. A happy American girl soldier. Note rubber gloves. The US military used many female soldiers for this duty. They apparently were kinky, as they seemed to get a kick out of it. A female general ran the operation.
Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, is a sadist who tortured Moslem prisoners, reminiscent of Ilse Koch, the notorious Nazi torturess, who also worked in prisons. It is easy to find victims there, I suppose.
An Abu Ghraib pic apparently no longer online. I found it on an ancient memory stick. Are we having fun yet?
President Trump has just pardoned several American war criminals, saying he wanted to give US soldiers the “confidence to fight.” This amounts to blanket permission to commit atrocities. A purpose of military training being to extirpate human decency and mercifulness, the obscene barbarism is not surprising. Atrocities are what soldiers do, and will do as long as the wars go on, being furiously denied by the government. (When I covered Force Recon, the Marine Corps Special Forces, the motto on the wall was “Crush Their Skulls and Eat Their Faces.”)
Perhaps the best known example of implied approval was Nixon’s pardon of Lt. Calley, who ordered the murder of Vietnamese villagers, for which he received three years of house arrest.
The Germans wanted empire, lebensraum, and resources, in particular oil. Americans want empire and oil, control of which allows control of the world They go about getting them by invasion and intimidation. Thus America wants to bring democracy and human rights to Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria, which have lots of oil, while it has occupation troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Mideast. What part of Syria is Trump occupying? Surprise, surprise! The part with the oil. Oil for the Americans, land for the Germans.
As Shirer points out, the German public was not enthusiastic about the war, at least not through 1940, as neither is the American public today. Neither public showed any concern about the hideousness its government inflicted around the world. What is the difference?
The parallels with the Reich are not complete. Washington does not essay genocide against Jews or blacks or any other internal population, being content with killing whoever its bombs fall upon. Trump cannot reasonably be likened to Hitler. He lacks the vision, the backbone, and apparently the viciousness. Hitler was a very smart, very evil man who knew exactly what he was doing, at least politically. This cannot be said of Trump. However, Hitler was, and Trump is, surrounded by freak-show curiosities of great bellicosity. Adolf had Goering, Goebbels, Himler, Rheinhardt Heydrich, Julius Streicher, Eichman. Trump has John Bolton, as amoral and pathologically aggressive as any in the Fuehrer’s entourage, or under a log. Pompeo, a bloated toad of a man, bears an uncanny resemblance to Goering. Both he and Pence are Christian heretics, Evangelicals, who believe they are connected to God on broadband. O’Brien sounds like Bolton. All want war with Iran and perhaps with China and Russia. Sieg heil, and run like hell.
My Lai, after Lt. Calley of the SS Totenkopf Div…excuse me, the Americal Division, I meant to say, brought human rights, freedom, and the American way.
Wikipedia: “Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers …Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated as were children as young as 12.”)
For this Calley got three years house arrest, less than the sentence for a bag of methamphetamine, until pardoned by Nixon. Many Americans said, and many still say, that he should not have been punished at all, that we needed to take the gloves off, let the troops fight. Again, this is what Trump said.
The German Nazis worshiped Blood and Soil, the land of Germany and the Teutonic race, which they believed to be genetically superior to all others. Americans can’t easily worship race. Instead they think themselves Exceptional, Indispensable, a Shining City on a Hill, the greatest civilization the world has known. Same narcissism and arrogance, slightly different foundation.
Nazi Germany was, like Nazi America, intensely militaristic. The US has hundreds of bases around the world (China has one overseas base, in Djibouti), spends appallingly on the military despite the lack of a credible military enemy. It currently buys new missile submarines (the Columbia class), aircraft carriers (the Ford class), intercontinental nuclear bombers (the B21), and fighter planes (the F-35).
Nazi Germany attacked Poland, Norway, Belgium, France, Russia, America, and England. America? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, supports a brutal proxy war against Yemen (Yemen is a grave threat to America), threatens Venezuela, China, and Iran with attack, embargoes Cuba. These are recent. Going back a bit, we have Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, the intervention in Panama, on and on. Millions and millions killed.
The Third Reich was, and America is, the chief threat to peace on the planet, a truly rogue state.
Is this something to be proud of?
On Rogues and Rogue States
I have just finished reading William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. (This may not fascinate you, but I am coming to something.) I first encountered it in high school. It is of course Shirer’s account as a correspondent in Germany of the rise of the Nazis. Most of it is well known to the educated. The Nazis, who had control over the domestic press, convinced the German population that the Poles were threatening Germany, as plausible as Guatemala threatening the United States. The Poles were said to be committing atrocities against Germans.
Then the Reich, with no justification whatever, having absolute air superiority, attacked Poland, bombing undefended cities and killing huge numbers of people. It was a German pattern several times repeated. Many reporters told of the smell of rotting bodies, of refugees dying of hunger and thirst. Today the Reich is endlessly remembered as a paragon of evil. It was.
How did Nazi Germany differ from the United States today? There is the same lying. Washington insisted that Iraq was about to get nuclear weapons, biological agents, that it had poisonous gas. None of this was true. The government, unimpeded by the media, persuaded over half of the American population that Iraq was responsible for Nine-Eleven. Now it says that Iran works to get nuclear weapons, and of course that the Russians are coming. The American press, informally but strictly controlled, carefully doesn’t challenge any of this.
Having prepped the American public as the Nazis prepped theirs, Washington unleashed a savage attack against Iraq, deliberately destroying infrastructure, leaving the country without power or purified water. The slaughter was godawful. But, said America, the war was to rid the Iraqi people of an evil dictator, to bring them democracy, freedom, and human rights. (The oil was entirely incidental. The oil is always incidental.)
Washington never sleeps in its campaigns to improve the lives of people whose most fervent wish is that America stop improving their lives. To give the Afghans democracy, human rights, and American values, the US has for eighteen years been bombing, bombing, bombing a largely illiterate population in a nation where America has no business. It is a coward’s war with warplanes butchering peasants who have no defenses. The pilots and drone operators who do this deserve contempt, as does the country that sends them. How many more years? For what purpose? And how were the German Nazis different?
The German Gestapo perpetrated sickening torture in hidden basements. America does the same, mainltaining torture prisons around the world. In these, men, and no doubt women, are hung by their wrists for days, naked in very cold rooms, kept awake and periodically beaten (exactly as described by survivors of Soviet torture. Nazis, whether American, Russian, or German, are Nazis.)
Photos of Iraqis at the American torture operation at Abu Ghraib showed prisoners, almost naked, lying in pools of blood. Tell me, please, how this differs from what was done by the Reich? (The bloodier photos are no longer online. Many that remain seem to have been edited.)
Abu Ghraib. A happy American girl soldier. Note rubber gloves. The US military used many female soldiers for this duty. They apparently were kinky, as they seemed to get a kick out of it. A female general ran the operation.
Abu Ghraib. A happy American girl soldier. Note rubber gloves. The US military used many female soldiers for this duty. They apparently were kinky, as they seemed to get a kick out of it. A female general ran the operation.
Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, is a sadist who tortured Moslem prisoners, reminiscent of Ilse Koch, the notorious Nazi torturess, who also worked in prisons. It is easy to find victims there, I suppose.
An Abu Ghraib pic apparently no longer online. I found it on an ancient memory stick. Are we having fun yet?
President Trump has just pardoned several American war criminals, saying he wanted to give US soldiers the “confidence to fight.” This amounts to blanket permission to commit atrocities. A purpose of military training being to extirpate human decency and mercifulness, the obscene barbarism is not surprising. Atrocities are what soldiers do, and will do as long as the wars go on, being furiously denied by the government. (When I covered Force Recon, the Marine Corps Special Forces, the motto on the wall was “Crush Their Skulls and Eat Their Faces.”)
Perhaps the best known example of implied approval was Nixon’s pardon of Lt. Calley, who ordered the murder of Vietnamese villagers, for which he received three years of house arrest.
The Germans wanted empire, lebensraum, and resources, in particular oil. Americans want empire and oil, control of which allows control of the world They go about getting them by invasion and intimidation. Thus America wants to bring democracy and human rights to Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria, which have lots of oil, while it has occupation troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Mideast. What part of Syria is Trump occupying? Surprise, surprise! The part with the oil. Oil for the Americans, land for the Germans.
As Shirer points out, the German public was not enthusiastic about the war, at least not through 1940, as neither is the American public today. Neither public showed any concern about the hideousness its government inflicted around the world. What is the difference?
The parallels with the Reich are not complete. Washington does not essay genocide against Jews or blacks or any other internal population, being content with killing whoever its bombs fall upon. Trump cannot reasonably be likened to Hitler. He lacks the vision, the backbone, and apparently the viciousness. Hitler was a very smart, very evil man who knew exactly what he was doing, at least politically. This cannot be said of Trump. However, Hitler was, and Trump is, surrounded by freak-show curiosities of great bellicosity. Adolf had Goering, Goebbels, Himler, Rheinhardt Heydrich, Julius Streicher, Eichman. Trump has John Bolton, as amoral and pathologically aggressive as any in the Fuehrer’s entourage, or under a log. Pompeo, a bloated toad of a man, bears an uncanny resemblance to Goering. Both he and Pence are Christian heretics, Evangelicals, who believe they are connected to God on broadband. O’Brien sounds like Bolton. All want war with Iran and perhaps with China and Russia. Sieg heil, and run like hell.
My Lai, after Lt. Calley of the SS Totenkopf Div…excuse me, the Americal Division, I meant to say, brought human rights, freedom, and the American way.
Wikipedia: “Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers …Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated as were children as young as 12.”)
For this Calley got three years house arrest, less than the sentence for a bag of methamphetamine, until pardoned by Nixon. Many Americans said, and many still say, that he should not have been punished at all, that we needed to take the gloves off, let the troops fight. Again, this is what Trump said.
The German Nazis worshiped Blood and Soil, the land of Germany and the Teutonic race, which they believed to be genetically superior to all others. Americans can’t easily worship race. Instead they think themselves Exceptional, Indispensable, a Shining City on a Hill, the greatest civilization the world has known. Same narcissism and arrogance, slightly different foundation.
Nazi Germany was, like Nazi America, intensely militaristic. The US has hundreds of bases around the world (China has one overseas base, in Djibouti), spends appallingly on the military despite the lack of a credible military enemy. It currently buys new missile submarines (the Columbia class), aircraft carriers (the Ford class), intercontinental nuclear bombers (the B21), and fighter planes (the F-35).
Nazi Germany attacked Poland, Norway, Belgium, France, Russia, America, and England. America? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, supports a brutal proxy war against Yemen (Yemen is a grave threat to America), threatens Venezuela, China, and Iran with attack, embargoes Cuba. These are recent. Going back a bit, we have Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, the intervention in Panama, on and on. Millions and millions killed.
The Third Reich was, and America is, the chief threat to peace on the planet, a truly rogue state.
Is this something to be proud of?
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
SC202-10
http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/2019/12/01/a-world-on-fire/
A World on Fire
Working up the energy for a blog for Sunday Collapse Brunch this week has been tough for a few reasons. Health wise, I am doing crappy again, but this isn't the only problem. My main computer is also getting close to death, it was crashing on me about every hour for a few days. Now it seems to be in a sort of remission.and hasn't crashed since late last night. So I am risking writing an article and hoping I don't lose it before I have a chance to publish.
Beyond the health issues and technical problems there are other deeper ones ongoing here. As I peruse the headlines on the Google Search Engine each day there is a new riot occurring in a new city. The entire continent of South America appears to be on fire now. Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil…you can bring up Videos now on YouTube that are IRL versions of Children of Men every day. Then there's Hong Kong, Paris, Barcelona and of course Istanbul & Tehran. Spin the Globe and plop your finger down any randm spot at all and you can find an ongoing political collapse.
Meanwhile here in the FSoA and across the Pond in Jolly Old England you have the Kabuki Theater productions of Impeachment and Brexit, which is almost not worth commenting on with so much more havoc ongoing in other nations as we speak, where people are literally being mowed down in the streets. Here exploding in numbers are the number of Homeless in just about every Big Shity from New York to Chicago to Seattle to Los Angeles. With that exploding population we are seeing Diseases now we haven't seen in such numbers ince the Middle Ages. Typhus, Typhoid Fever, Cholera, their all making a comeback in ever increasing numbers.
The above video is just one of hundreds you can Google up these days if you are concerned about this ever growing problem. Cities and towns all across the country are passing laws that essentially criminalize homelessness, so the current solution seems to be to put them in jail Can we really build enough jails to give all these folks 3 Hots and a Cot? It's notoriously expensive to drop people in jail also, it costs nearly double wnat I live on per year these days, but building Affordable Housing isn't being done much. There aren't the job programs or jobs to give these folks something productive to do with their lives. They are of course disproportionately Black, Brown and Hispanic people, but plenty of poor White Trash out there too.
For the real Street level Homeless in a ramshackle tent under an overpass somewhere, they aren't living,they are waiting to die. There are levels and degrees of homelessness though, there are people couch surfing if they still have friends or relatives who will take them in; there are people living in RVs and Vans in the Walmart parking lots. Does anyone have a count or keep statistics on how many people are in this situation? I susspect it is much larger than the numbers out there sleeping rough.
Still, with all this evidence of Collapse overwhelming the Newz Cycle, there is still also a huge cadre of Amerikans who deny it is occurring, still enjoying Thanksgiving Dinner and still shopping till they drop on Black Friday, although they do it mostly Online now so you don't have those ridiulous scenes at Walmart or Best Buy of fistfights betwen shoppers looking for a great deal on an Iphone. If they still have a job or get enough Mailbox Money to live comfortably, they simply don't notice all the people who have ALREADY fallen off the cliff. Now the Clown-in-Chief is floating a plan to cut millions off from their SNAP Card allotment of monthly nourishment. If that flies, things will not end well. The problems you see today in Santiago or Bogota will migrate quite rapidly north of the border.
There is no question anymore, COLLAPSE HAS ARRIVED. It can and will get a lot worse of course. But there is no more question for a Collapse Writer anymore of "When will SHTF Day arrive?" It has already come and gone. For me, it gets harder all the time to write or even just post Newz Links, because Diners have seen it all and heard it all for years now. There's nothing really NEW here, it's just a steady increase in the frequency and magnitude of the events.
The same advice as always still applies, get out of the Big Shity and go off grid if you can. If you can't, plan for a Bugout when your neighborhood deteriorates too much. Form COMMUNITY, get together with friends and relatives you know and trust. Prep up with Food, Fuel, Generators, Fishing Gear, traps and of course the old standby of Guns & Ammo.
I am out of the bizness of making Nostradamus Predictons of when things will thoroughly unravel in any given neighborhood. I don't know when it will arrive for you if it hasn't happened to you already. But it's coming, and it's coming fast. Everybody Knows.
A World on Fire
Working up the energy for a blog for Sunday Collapse Brunch this week has been tough for a few reasons. Health wise, I am doing crappy again, but this isn't the only problem. My main computer is also getting close to death, it was crashing on me about every hour for a few days. Now it seems to be in a sort of remission.and hasn't crashed since late last night. So I am risking writing an article and hoping I don't lose it before I have a chance to publish.
Beyond the health issues and technical problems there are other deeper ones ongoing here. As I peruse the headlines on the Google Search Engine each day there is a new riot occurring in a new city. The entire continent of South America appears to be on fire now. Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil…you can bring up Videos now on YouTube that are IRL versions of Children of Men every day. Then there's Hong Kong, Paris, Barcelona and of course Istanbul & Tehran. Spin the Globe and plop your finger down any randm spot at all and you can find an ongoing political collapse.
Meanwhile here in the FSoA and across the Pond in Jolly Old England you have the Kabuki Theater productions of Impeachment and Brexit, which is almost not worth commenting on with so much more havoc ongoing in other nations as we speak, where people are literally being mowed down in the streets. Here exploding in numbers are the number of Homeless in just about every Big Shity from New York to Chicago to Seattle to Los Angeles. With that exploding population we are seeing Diseases now we haven't seen in such numbers ince the Middle Ages. Typhus, Typhoid Fever, Cholera, their all making a comeback in ever increasing numbers.
The above video is just one of hundreds you can Google up these days if you are concerned about this ever growing problem. Cities and towns all across the country are passing laws that essentially criminalize homelessness, so the current solution seems to be to put them in jail Can we really build enough jails to give all these folks 3 Hots and a Cot? It's notoriously expensive to drop people in jail also, it costs nearly double wnat I live on per year these days, but building Affordable Housing isn't being done much. There aren't the job programs or jobs to give these folks something productive to do with their lives. They are of course disproportionately Black, Brown and Hispanic people, but plenty of poor White Trash out there too.
For the real Street level Homeless in a ramshackle tent under an overpass somewhere, they aren't living,they are waiting to die. There are levels and degrees of homelessness though, there are people couch surfing if they still have friends or relatives who will take them in; there are people living in RVs and Vans in the Walmart parking lots. Does anyone have a count or keep statistics on how many people are in this situation? I susspect it is much larger than the numbers out there sleeping rough.
Still, with all this evidence of Collapse overwhelming the Newz Cycle, there is still also a huge cadre of Amerikans who deny it is occurring, still enjoying Thanksgiving Dinner and still shopping till they drop on Black Friday, although they do it mostly Online now so you don't have those ridiulous scenes at Walmart or Best Buy of fistfights betwen shoppers looking for a great deal on an Iphone. If they still have a job or get enough Mailbox Money to live comfortably, they simply don't notice all the people who have ALREADY fallen off the cliff. Now the Clown-in-Chief is floating a plan to cut millions off from their SNAP Card allotment of monthly nourishment. If that flies, things will not end well. The problems you see today in Santiago or Bogota will migrate quite rapidly north of the border.
There is no question anymore, COLLAPSE HAS ARRIVED. It can and will get a lot worse of course. But there is no more question for a Collapse Writer anymore of "When will SHTF Day arrive?" It has already come and gone. For me, it gets harder all the time to write or even just post Newz Links, because Diners have seen it all and heard it all for years now. There's nothing really NEW here, it's just a steady increase in the frequency and magnitude of the events.
The same advice as always still applies, get out of the Big Shity and go off grid if you can. If you can't, plan for a Bugout when your neighborhood deteriorates too much. Form COMMUNITY, get together with friends and relatives you know and trust. Prep up with Food, Fuel, Generators, Fishing Gear, traps and of course the old standby of Guns & Ammo.
I am out of the bizness of making Nostradamus Predictons of when things will thoroughly unravel in any given neighborhood. I don't know when it will arrive for you if it hasn't happened to you already. But it's coming, and it's coming fast. Everybody Knows.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
SC202-9
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/12/17/monetary-looting/
Monetary Looting
The United States has historically bragged about its free and transparent markets. But what the Fed is doing today is pulling a dark curtain around the financing of this so-called free and transparent market. The public has no idea which Wall Street firms have received this $3 trillion or why they can’t borrow it elsewhere. This kind of obfuscation by the Federal Reserve could actually stimulate distrust in the U.S. banking system. The Fed admitted as much in its most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes, writing that participation in the Fed’s loan program “could become stigmatized.”
– Wall Street on Parade: Is the Fed’s $3 Trillion in Loans to Trading Houses on Wall Street Legal?
The business model of Wall Street is fraud.
– Bernie Sanders
Financial services as currently structured is the most pernicious, predatory and corrupt industry on earth. Moreover, it’s the deliberately complex and opaque nature of the industry which then limits public debate when some problem arises and governments and central banks are called upon to take emergency measures to “save the system,” which is just a euphemism for enormous sums of corporate welfare being funneled to people and institutions who couldn’t survive otherwise.
It is systemic looting on a massive scale and the primary patrons of this ongoing and seemingly endless scheme are central banks. In the U.S. this means the Federal Reserve, which recently came back into the “market” with enormous new interventions in both the repo market and via renewed balance sheet expansion. I’ve read many of the smart takes on the repo crisis and still don’t feel confident I know precisely what’s going on. This is intentional.
One of the main reasons big finance is able to pull off scam after scam in plain sight relates to the complexity, opacity and esoteric jargon associated with the industry. Repo is a perfect example. The market had a spasm in September and the Fed immediately rushed in with billions to bring the rate down without offering any transparency or a credible explanation of what was going on. Meanwhile, as the crisis continued over subsequent months and the central bank response grew larger and larger, we actually seem to be learning less with each passing day.
Instead of providing the public with the transparency it deserves, Fed officials run around pretending to be financial surgeons called in to perform an unexpected emergency operation on a patient after a freak accident. In reality, central banks are merely pumping billions into an already dead body while enriching connected and powerful individuals and institutions in the process. They know exactly what they’re doing and we need to stop pretending otherwise.
While I’m grateful to those who’ve spent time trying to thoughtfully explain the mechanics of the repo crisis and why it happened, I think that’s a sideshow at this point since nobody who really knows what’s going on is talking. Instead, we should focus on the absurd and unconscionable lack of transparency with regard to Federal Reserve actions. As far as I know, we have no idea which parties are taking up this expanded central bank funding. Think about how criminally insane that is. We have no idea if it’s driven by a troubled institution like Deutsche Bank, hedge funds with over-leveraged trades, treasury issuance, a combination of these factors, or something else.
We don’t know because they don’t want us to know, and they don’t want us to know because they don’t want the public thinking or talking about it. It’s at times like these when the totalitarian nature of central banking comes into crystal clear focus. What we have is government via unelected, unaccountable bankers. It’s the opposite of self-government, and understanding this simple fact blows apart all the myths about our so-called democracy and freedom. Nothing of the sort exists in reality, and when push comes to shove, you’re just a peasant living in an imperial oligarchy.
This should be the real takeaway from the Fed’s recent actions both in the repo market and via its rapid balance sheet expansion. The public’s not allowed to know anything about what’s really happening, and similar to the post-financial crisis period of a decade ago, the central bank comes in and conducts significant public policy to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars with zero public debate.
How is it that we’re accepting this? Why isn’t the inequality obsessed left commenting more aggressively on the central bank mechanism of upward wealth transfer, which is precisely what’s been happening for so long? Why push for a wealth tax while leaving the primary instrument of upward wealth transfer (central banking) completely unchecked?
It’d be one thing if the Fed came out and detailed exactly what the problem is and told us specifically who’s using the funds and why. Then we could actually have a conversation about whether this is appropriate or, more likely, a gigantic moral hazard financially rewarding various unscrupulous industry players.
Don’t think for a moment that huge sums of money aren’t being made from these Fed actions. When the spigots come on out of nowhere to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars someone is benefitting tremendously and it’s not you.
Monetary Looting
The United States has historically bragged about its free and transparent markets. But what the Fed is doing today is pulling a dark curtain around the financing of this so-called free and transparent market. The public has no idea which Wall Street firms have received this $3 trillion or why they can’t borrow it elsewhere. This kind of obfuscation by the Federal Reserve could actually stimulate distrust in the U.S. banking system. The Fed admitted as much in its most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes, writing that participation in the Fed’s loan program “could become stigmatized.”
– Wall Street on Parade: Is the Fed’s $3 Trillion in Loans to Trading Houses on Wall Street Legal?
The business model of Wall Street is fraud.
– Bernie Sanders
Financial services as currently structured is the most pernicious, predatory and corrupt industry on earth. Moreover, it’s the deliberately complex and opaque nature of the industry which then limits public debate when some problem arises and governments and central banks are called upon to take emergency measures to “save the system,” which is just a euphemism for enormous sums of corporate welfare being funneled to people and institutions who couldn’t survive otherwise.
It is systemic looting on a massive scale and the primary patrons of this ongoing and seemingly endless scheme are central banks. In the U.S. this means the Federal Reserve, which recently came back into the “market” with enormous new interventions in both the repo market and via renewed balance sheet expansion. I’ve read many of the smart takes on the repo crisis and still don’t feel confident I know precisely what’s going on. This is intentional.
One of the main reasons big finance is able to pull off scam after scam in plain sight relates to the complexity, opacity and esoteric jargon associated with the industry. Repo is a perfect example. The market had a spasm in September and the Fed immediately rushed in with billions to bring the rate down without offering any transparency or a credible explanation of what was going on. Meanwhile, as the crisis continued over subsequent months and the central bank response grew larger and larger, we actually seem to be learning less with each passing day.
Instead of providing the public with the transparency it deserves, Fed officials run around pretending to be financial surgeons called in to perform an unexpected emergency operation on a patient after a freak accident. In reality, central banks are merely pumping billions into an already dead body while enriching connected and powerful individuals and institutions in the process. They know exactly what they’re doing and we need to stop pretending otherwise.
While I’m grateful to those who’ve spent time trying to thoughtfully explain the mechanics of the repo crisis and why it happened, I think that’s a sideshow at this point since nobody who really knows what’s going on is talking. Instead, we should focus on the absurd and unconscionable lack of transparency with regard to Federal Reserve actions. As far as I know, we have no idea which parties are taking up this expanded central bank funding. Think about how criminally insane that is. We have no idea if it’s driven by a troubled institution like Deutsche Bank, hedge funds with over-leveraged trades, treasury issuance, a combination of these factors, or something else.
We don’t know because they don’t want us to know, and they don’t want us to know because they don’t want the public thinking or talking about it. It’s at times like these when the totalitarian nature of central banking comes into crystal clear focus. What we have is government via unelected, unaccountable bankers. It’s the opposite of self-government, and understanding this simple fact blows apart all the myths about our so-called democracy and freedom. Nothing of the sort exists in reality, and when push comes to shove, you’re just a peasant living in an imperial oligarchy.
This should be the real takeaway from the Fed’s recent actions both in the repo market and via its rapid balance sheet expansion. The public’s not allowed to know anything about what’s really happening, and similar to the post-financial crisis period of a decade ago, the central bank comes in and conducts significant public policy to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars with zero public debate.
How is it that we’re accepting this? Why isn’t the inequality obsessed left commenting more aggressively on the central bank mechanism of upward wealth transfer, which is precisely what’s been happening for so long? Why push for a wealth tax while leaving the primary instrument of upward wealth transfer (central banking) completely unchecked?
It’d be one thing if the Fed came out and detailed exactly what the problem is and told us specifically who’s using the funds and why. Then we could actually have a conversation about whether this is appropriate or, more likely, a gigantic moral hazard financially rewarding various unscrupulous industry players.
Don’t think for a moment that huge sums of money aren’t being made from these Fed actions. When the spigots come on out of nowhere to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars someone is benefitting tremendously and it’s not you.
Monday, December 16, 2019
SC202-8
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/hope-lies-in-the-streets/
Hope Lies in the Streets
Global finance capital has seized control of the economies of most nation-states. The citizens watch, helplessly, as money and goods are transferred with little regulation across borders. They watch as jobs in manufacturing and the professions are shipped to regions of the global south where most workers are paid a dollar or less an hour and receive no benefits. They watch as the taxes of the rich and corporations are slashed, often to zero. They watch as austerity programs dismantle or privatize utilities and basic social services, jacking up fees to consumers. They watch as chronic unemployment and underemployment devastate workers, especially the young. They watch as wages stagnate or decline, leaving working men and women with unsustainable debts. This economic tyranny lies at the root of the unrest in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon as well as the rise of right-wing demagogues and false prophets such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
It does not matter whether liberals or conservatives, Tories or Labour, Republicans or Democrats are in power. Finance capital is impervious to political control. The newly defeated Labour Party in Britain, by adopting a Brexit-neutral stance in the election, badly misread the zeitgeist. Yes, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had to contend with hysterical warnings of economic collapse and endured a smear campaign—amplified by a media mouthing the accusations of his Tory opponents—that included claims he was a threat to national security and an anti-Semite, but his and Labour’s failure to appreciate how desperate workers were for a solution, even one growing out of magical thinking about the promise of Brexit, was a mistake. Brexit is not a realistic alternative to economic tyranny. But it at least offers a hope, however unfounded, of shattering the bonds of corporate power. It posits itself as a weapon in the war between the insiders and the outsiders. That this desperate hope by the outsiders is peddled by con artists and charlatans such as Johnson and Trump is part of the sickness of our age, an echo of the economic distortions and right-wing populism that saw fascists rise to power in Italy and Germany in the first part of the 20th century.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Exxon Mobile, Walmart, Apple and Amazon are the modern versions of the East India Company or La Compagnie Française de l’Orient et de la Chine. These and others among today’s global corporations, with the assistance of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, have created unassailable monopolies and effectively hollowed out many nation-states, both physically and culturally. Forlorn, derelict urban wastelands, populated by the bitterly dispossessed, are as common in France or Britain as they are in America’s Rust Belt. Governments, captive to corporate control, have been prostituted to transfer wealth upward, swell corporate profits and crush dissent at the expense of democracy.
The decay and rupture of the social bonds that once held our societies together have unleashed the dark pathologies of opioid, alcohol and gambling addictions and led to an explosion of hate crimes and mass shootings, along with suicide. Social control provided by work, civic and political participation—bonds that integrated us into our communities and gave us a sense of place, dignity and agency—has been handed over to a heavily militarized police, a massive prison system and a judicial system complicit in abolishing basic rights, including due process and privacy.
So, to steal a line from Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done? Can a reformist political candidate, a Bernie Sanders or perhaps an Elizabeth Warren—although I question the authenticity of Warren—defeat Trump and the retrograde forces that empower him? Or will the U.S. reformers suffer Corbyn’s fate? In short, can the system be reformed from the inside? Or will we have to take to the streets, as the people are doing in Chile, Lebanon, France, Hong Kong and elsewhere, to demand the overthrow of corporate rule?
The left, even under Corbyn, is not ready to speak in revolutionary language. Revolutionary rhetoric within the political system has been adopted by the neofascists and the hard right. The Brexit debate is about blowing up the system, not working within it. Those who support Brexit and Johnson will, like those who support Trump, be betrayed. But the language employed by Johnson and Trump is about destruction, and this yearning for destruction runs deep among the working class. The tragedy is that by backing these demagogues the public is complicit in its own enslavement.
Extinction Rebellion, which I support, is attempting to counter this corporate assault and the consequent ecocide with revolutionary language and sustained civil disobedience designed to make governance impossible. I hope Extinction Rebellion will gain enough popular support to raise a strong barrier before the corporate state starts employing the brute force outlined in Operation Yellowhammer, the six-page British government plan that calls for the possible deployment of 50,000 regular and reserved troops and 10,000 riot police to cope with the unrest that might be caused by food and medical shortages following Britain’s departure from the European Union.
The violent suppression of protesters in France, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, India and Hong Kong is already underway, a window into what may be coming to England, the United States and other countries that attempt to throw off the yoke of corporate oppression.
The corporate state loathes the political left, but the American political left, by agreeing to operate within the constrained and largely rigged electoral system, is easily neutered, as liberalism was this year in Britain and was in 2016—and will be in 2020—in the United States. America’s Democratic Party leadership, as hostile to its progressive candidates as many in the Labour Party hierarchy in Britain were to Corbyn, employed a series of measures to prevent Sanders from obtaining the nomination in 2016. They included a superdelegates scheme, the use of hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate money, iron control of the Democratic National Committee and blocking those registered as independents from voting in Democratic primaries. Politicians such as Sanders and Corbyn are easily dispatched.
But while the corporate state detests political mavericks such as Sanders and Corbyn, it both hates and fears the revolutionary left. The revolutionary left speaks an unvarnished truth about corporate power and calls out the entire political ruling class for its complicity. It is not interested in accommodation. It seeks to disrupt and paralyze the corporate state. When many thousands, as in Hong Kong, take to the streets shouting slogans like “There are no rioters, only a tyrannical regime” and “It was you who taught me that peaceful marches are useless,” the corporate ruling elites begin to worry. This is why populist leaders, including Eric Drouet of the gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, in France, are arrested. It is why Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, spent six weeks in jail this fall in Britain. It is why Edward Leung is serving a six-year prison sentence on charges of rioting and assaulting a police officer during the 2016 Fishball Revolution in Hong Kong. Revolutionaries refuse to play by the rules.
These global revolutionary movements embody a resurrection of the concept of the common good, the belief that a society should be structured around caring for all its members, especially the most vulnerable. They are forces of solidarity, even community. They understand, as the economist Karl Polanyi wrote, that there are two kinds of freedoms. There are the bad freedoms to exploit those around us and extract huge profits without regard to the common good. And there are the good freedoms—freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job—that the bad freedoms destroy. The bad freedoms, championed by an atomized, hyper-individualistic consumer culture, which kneels before the cult of the self, have triumphed. The death grip of the ruling elites was illustrated in recent days in Madrid, where world leaders refused during COP25—the United Nations’ conference on climate change—to take meaningful action to halt the climate emergency, an existential threat to humankind.
The bankrupt ideologies of globalization and neoliberalism, formulated and used to justify the consolidation of wealth and power as well as the ecocide that is devastating the planet, have, however, lost their credibility. Neoliberalism, the idea that once regulations on corporations and trade barriers are lifted and taxes slashed, a society will prosper, was always an absurdity. None of its promises could be defended by the history and theory of economics. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations, sending production to the global south, privatizing public services and destroying labor unions does not distribute wealth. Allowing global speculators to use money lent to them by the government at virtually zero percent interest to buy back their stock does not distribute wealth. Permitting corporations to engage in structured asset destruction through inflation, to strip assets through mergers and acquisitions, to raise the levels of debt incumbency to enforce debt peonage on the public, to engage in corporate fraud that includes the dispossession of assets, does not distribute wealth. The raiding of pension funds, credit and stock manipulations and looting the U.S. Treasury when the bubbles and Ponzi schemes evaporate does not distribute wealth. Such actions funnel wealth to those at the top. They create enormous income inequality and monopoly power. They fuel discontent and political extremism. They make the planet uninhabitable for most species. They destroy democracy.
But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power. Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. The idiocy of the intellectual gurus who sold us this ideology—Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand—should have exposed the con from the beginning, but they were given ample platforms, while their critics, the old Keynesians, were pushed out and silenced. Freedom became equated with freedom of market forces to do anything the capitalists wanted. And that freedom doomed us and looks set to doom the ecosystem on which we depend for life. Karl Marx in volume one of “Capital” explained over a century ago how freedom of the market always results in social inequality.
The loss of credibility of the reigning ideology has led the ruling elites to forge an alliance with right-wing, neofascist demagogues such as Trump and Johnson who employ the tropes of racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, bigotry and misogyny to channel the public’s growing rage and frustration away from the corporate elites and toward the vulnerable. These demagogues accelerate the pillage. They accelerate the hatred, racism and violence that act as a diversion. And they accelerate the social unrest that becomes the excuse for the imposition of tyranny. Hope lies in the streets. Millions of people in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon understand. It is time to join them.
Hope Lies in the Streets
Global finance capital has seized control of the economies of most nation-states. The citizens watch, helplessly, as money and goods are transferred with little regulation across borders. They watch as jobs in manufacturing and the professions are shipped to regions of the global south where most workers are paid a dollar or less an hour and receive no benefits. They watch as the taxes of the rich and corporations are slashed, often to zero. They watch as austerity programs dismantle or privatize utilities and basic social services, jacking up fees to consumers. They watch as chronic unemployment and underemployment devastate workers, especially the young. They watch as wages stagnate or decline, leaving working men and women with unsustainable debts. This economic tyranny lies at the root of the unrest in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon as well as the rise of right-wing demagogues and false prophets such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
It does not matter whether liberals or conservatives, Tories or Labour, Republicans or Democrats are in power. Finance capital is impervious to political control. The newly defeated Labour Party in Britain, by adopting a Brexit-neutral stance in the election, badly misread the zeitgeist. Yes, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had to contend with hysterical warnings of economic collapse and endured a smear campaign—amplified by a media mouthing the accusations of his Tory opponents—that included claims he was a threat to national security and an anti-Semite, but his and Labour’s failure to appreciate how desperate workers were for a solution, even one growing out of magical thinking about the promise of Brexit, was a mistake. Brexit is not a realistic alternative to economic tyranny. But it at least offers a hope, however unfounded, of shattering the bonds of corporate power. It posits itself as a weapon in the war between the insiders and the outsiders. That this desperate hope by the outsiders is peddled by con artists and charlatans such as Johnson and Trump is part of the sickness of our age, an echo of the economic distortions and right-wing populism that saw fascists rise to power in Italy and Germany in the first part of the 20th century.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Exxon Mobile, Walmart, Apple and Amazon are the modern versions of the East India Company or La Compagnie Française de l’Orient et de la Chine. These and others among today’s global corporations, with the assistance of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, have created unassailable monopolies and effectively hollowed out many nation-states, both physically and culturally. Forlorn, derelict urban wastelands, populated by the bitterly dispossessed, are as common in France or Britain as they are in America’s Rust Belt. Governments, captive to corporate control, have been prostituted to transfer wealth upward, swell corporate profits and crush dissent at the expense of democracy.
The decay and rupture of the social bonds that once held our societies together have unleashed the dark pathologies of opioid, alcohol and gambling addictions and led to an explosion of hate crimes and mass shootings, along with suicide. Social control provided by work, civic and political participation—bonds that integrated us into our communities and gave us a sense of place, dignity and agency—has been handed over to a heavily militarized police, a massive prison system and a judicial system complicit in abolishing basic rights, including due process and privacy.
So, to steal a line from Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done? Can a reformist political candidate, a Bernie Sanders or perhaps an Elizabeth Warren—although I question the authenticity of Warren—defeat Trump and the retrograde forces that empower him? Or will the U.S. reformers suffer Corbyn’s fate? In short, can the system be reformed from the inside? Or will we have to take to the streets, as the people are doing in Chile, Lebanon, France, Hong Kong and elsewhere, to demand the overthrow of corporate rule?
The left, even under Corbyn, is not ready to speak in revolutionary language. Revolutionary rhetoric within the political system has been adopted by the neofascists and the hard right. The Brexit debate is about blowing up the system, not working within it. Those who support Brexit and Johnson will, like those who support Trump, be betrayed. But the language employed by Johnson and Trump is about destruction, and this yearning for destruction runs deep among the working class. The tragedy is that by backing these demagogues the public is complicit in its own enslavement.
Extinction Rebellion, which I support, is attempting to counter this corporate assault and the consequent ecocide with revolutionary language and sustained civil disobedience designed to make governance impossible. I hope Extinction Rebellion will gain enough popular support to raise a strong barrier before the corporate state starts employing the brute force outlined in Operation Yellowhammer, the six-page British government plan that calls for the possible deployment of 50,000 regular and reserved troops and 10,000 riot police to cope with the unrest that might be caused by food and medical shortages following Britain’s departure from the European Union.
The violent suppression of protesters in France, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, India and Hong Kong is already underway, a window into what may be coming to England, the United States and other countries that attempt to throw off the yoke of corporate oppression.
The corporate state loathes the political left, but the American political left, by agreeing to operate within the constrained and largely rigged electoral system, is easily neutered, as liberalism was this year in Britain and was in 2016—and will be in 2020—in the United States. America’s Democratic Party leadership, as hostile to its progressive candidates as many in the Labour Party hierarchy in Britain were to Corbyn, employed a series of measures to prevent Sanders from obtaining the nomination in 2016. They included a superdelegates scheme, the use of hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate money, iron control of the Democratic National Committee and blocking those registered as independents from voting in Democratic primaries. Politicians such as Sanders and Corbyn are easily dispatched.
But while the corporate state detests political mavericks such as Sanders and Corbyn, it both hates and fears the revolutionary left. The revolutionary left speaks an unvarnished truth about corporate power and calls out the entire political ruling class for its complicity. It is not interested in accommodation. It seeks to disrupt and paralyze the corporate state. When many thousands, as in Hong Kong, take to the streets shouting slogans like “There are no rioters, only a tyrannical regime” and “It was you who taught me that peaceful marches are useless,” the corporate ruling elites begin to worry. This is why populist leaders, including Eric Drouet of the gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, in France, are arrested. It is why Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, spent six weeks in jail this fall in Britain. It is why Edward Leung is serving a six-year prison sentence on charges of rioting and assaulting a police officer during the 2016 Fishball Revolution in Hong Kong. Revolutionaries refuse to play by the rules.
These global revolutionary movements embody a resurrection of the concept of the common good, the belief that a society should be structured around caring for all its members, especially the most vulnerable. They are forces of solidarity, even community. They understand, as the economist Karl Polanyi wrote, that there are two kinds of freedoms. There are the bad freedoms to exploit those around us and extract huge profits without regard to the common good. And there are the good freedoms—freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job—that the bad freedoms destroy. The bad freedoms, championed by an atomized, hyper-individualistic consumer culture, which kneels before the cult of the self, have triumphed. The death grip of the ruling elites was illustrated in recent days in Madrid, where world leaders refused during COP25—the United Nations’ conference on climate change—to take meaningful action to halt the climate emergency, an existential threat to humankind.
The bankrupt ideologies of globalization and neoliberalism, formulated and used to justify the consolidation of wealth and power as well as the ecocide that is devastating the planet, have, however, lost their credibility. Neoliberalism, the idea that once regulations on corporations and trade barriers are lifted and taxes slashed, a society will prosper, was always an absurdity. None of its promises could be defended by the history and theory of economics. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations, sending production to the global south, privatizing public services and destroying labor unions does not distribute wealth. Allowing global speculators to use money lent to them by the government at virtually zero percent interest to buy back their stock does not distribute wealth. Permitting corporations to engage in structured asset destruction through inflation, to strip assets through mergers and acquisitions, to raise the levels of debt incumbency to enforce debt peonage on the public, to engage in corporate fraud that includes the dispossession of assets, does not distribute wealth. The raiding of pension funds, credit and stock manipulations and looting the U.S. Treasury when the bubbles and Ponzi schemes evaporate does not distribute wealth. Such actions funnel wealth to those at the top. They create enormous income inequality and monopoly power. They fuel discontent and political extremism. They make the planet uninhabitable for most species. They destroy democracy.
But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power. Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. The idiocy of the intellectual gurus who sold us this ideology—Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand—should have exposed the con from the beginning, but they were given ample platforms, while their critics, the old Keynesians, were pushed out and silenced. Freedom became equated with freedom of market forces to do anything the capitalists wanted. And that freedom doomed us and looks set to doom the ecosystem on which we depend for life. Karl Marx in volume one of “Capital” explained over a century ago how freedom of the market always results in social inequality.
The loss of credibility of the reigning ideology has led the ruling elites to forge an alliance with right-wing, neofascist demagogues such as Trump and Johnson who employ the tropes of racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, bigotry and misogyny to channel the public’s growing rage and frustration away from the corporate elites and toward the vulnerable. These demagogues accelerate the pillage. They accelerate the hatred, racism and violence that act as a diversion. And they accelerate the social unrest that becomes the excuse for the imposition of tyranny. Hope lies in the streets. Millions of people in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon understand. It is time to join them.
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