https://scheerpost.com/2020/06/15/chris-hedges-gaslighted-by-the-ruling-class/
Gaslighted by the Ruling Class
Police take the knee. NASCAR and the U.S. Marine Corps ban the display of the Confederate flag. Nancy Pelosi uses a kente scarf as a political prop. Joe Biden, one of the driving forces behind militarized police, the massive expansion of mass incarceration and the doubling and tripling of sentences, speaks at George Floyd’s funeral. The National Football League apologizes for its insensitivity to racism, although no teams appear to be negotiating with Colin Kaepernick.
The mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bower, had the words “Black Lives Matter” painted in 35-foot-tall letters on a street near the White House but has also proposed a $45 million increase in the police budget and the construction of a $500 million new jail. The press, which does not confront corporate power and rarely covers the poor, rendering them and their communities invisible, engages in circular firing squads, sacking or admonishing editors and journalists for racially insensitive thoughtcrimes, to advertise its commitment to people of color.
Once again, we see proposed legislation to mandate police reform — more body cameras, consent decrees, revised use-of-force policies, banning chokeholds, civilian review boards, requiring officers to intervene when they see misconduct, banning no-knock search warrants, more training in de-escalation tactics, a requirement by law enforcement agencies to report use-of-force data, nationally enforced standards for police training and greater diversity — proposals made, and in several cases adopted in the wake of numerous other police murders, including those of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Philando Castile. The Minneapolis Police Department, for example, established a duty to intervene requirement by police officers after the 2014 killing of Brown in Ferguson. This requirement did not save Floyd.
Police unions, often little more than white hate groups, continue to have the unassailable power to brush aside would-be reformers, including community review boards, mayors and police chiefs. These unions generously bankroll the campaigns of elected officials, including public prosecutors, who do their bidding. Police unions and associations have contributed $7 million to candidates running for office in New York state alone, including $600,000 to Andrew Cuomo during his gubernatorial campaigns.
It is, as Yogi Berra said, “déjà vu all over again.”
The public displays of solidarity are, as in the past, smoke and mirrors, a pantomime of faux anguish and empathy by bankrupt ruling elites, including most Black politicians groomed by the Democratic Party and out of touch with the daily humiliation, stress of economic misery and suffering that defines the lives of many of the protesters.
These elites have no intention of instituting anything more than cosmetic change. They refuse to ask the questions that matter because they do not want to hear the answers. They are systems managers. They use these symbolic gestures to gaslight the public and leave our failed democracy, from which they and their corporate benefactors benefit, untouched. What we are watching in this outpouring of televised solidarity with the victims of police violence is an example of what Bertram Gross calls “friendly fascism,” the “nice-guy mask” used to disguise the despotism of the ultra-rich and our corporate overseers. Whatever you think about Donald Trump, he is at least open about his racism, lust for state violence and commitment to white supremacy.
The crisis we face is not, as the ruling elites want us to believe, limited to police violence. It is a class and generational revolt. It will not be solved with new police reforms, which always result, as Princeton professor Naomi Murakawa points out in her book “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” in less accountable, larger and more lethal police forces.
The problem is an economic and political system that has by design created a nation of serfs and obscenely rich masters. The problem is deindustrialization, offshoring of manufacturing, automation and austerity programs that allow families to be priced out of our for-profit healthcare system and see nearly one in five children 12 and younger without enough to eat.
The problem is an electoral system that is legalized bribery designed to serve a tiny, unaccountable cabal of oligarchs that engage in legalized tax boycotts, deregulation, theft and financial fraud. The problem is that at least half of the working class and working poor, a figure growing exponentially as the pandemic swells the ranks of the unemployed, have been cast aside as human refuse and are being sacrificed on the altar of profit as the country reopens for business and the pandemic crashes in wave after wave on front line workers.
The problem is the diversion of state resources, including over half all federal discretionary spending, to an unaccountable military machine that wages endless and futile wars overseas, the savage face of white supremacy beyond our border. This military machine perfects its brutal tactics and tools for control on people of color in the Middle East, as it did in other eras in Vietnam, Latin America and the Philippines. It passes on this knowledge, along with its surplus equipment, including sophisticated equipment for wholesale surveillance, drones, heavily armed SWAT teams, grenade launchers and armored vehicles, to police at home. Smashing down a door and terrorizing a family in a night police raid in Detroit looks no different from a night raid carried out against an Afghan family by Army Rangers in Kandahar.
Empires eventually consume themselves. Thucydides wrote of the Athenian empire that the tyranny it imposed on others it finally imposed on itself.
The entrenched racism in America has always meant that poor people of color are the first cast aside in society and disproportionately suffer from the most brutal forms of social control meted out by the police and the prison system. But there will not be, as Martin Luther King pointed out, racial justice until there is economic justice. And there will not be economic justice until we wrest power back from the hands of our corporate masters.
Until that happens, we will go through cycle after cycle of brutal police murders and cycle after cycle of the profuse apologies and promises of reform. We are trapped in an abusive relationship. When we finally have enough, when we cry out in pain and walk out, our abuser comes after us with flowers and apologies and promises to change. Back we go for more.
My hope is that this time around the gaslighting will not work. The protestors that have taken to the streets in some 750 cities are young, diverse, angry and savvy. Many were betrayed by the Democratic Party hierarchy who once again ganged up on Bernie Sanders to shove a corporate stooge down our throats, the calculation by the ruling elites being that as awful as Biden is, we will vote for him because he is not Trump. That this tactic failed in 2016 doesn’t seem to faze the oligarchs.
Many of those in the streets can’t find meaningful work, are often burdened by large sums of student debt and have realized that in this world of serfs and masters they don’t have much of a future. They understand that if these protests are to succeed, they must be led by people of color, those who suffer disproportionally from the inequities and violence meted out by the occupying forces of the corporate state. And they also know that social inequality is at the root of the evil we must vanquish.
The ruling elites will never willingly defund or abolish the police, which cost taxpayers $100 billion annually and often eat up half of city budgets, for the same reason they will never pay a minimum wage to the 2.3 million prisoners who work in our ever-expanding gulag. By defunding or abolishing the police, or by paying prison workers fair wages, the primary bulwark used to keep a subjugated population in check will be removed, or in the case of prisons make the system of neo-slavery financially unsustainable.
Rather, the elites, while assuring us that they feel our pain, will insist, as Biden is doing, that by throwing even more money at the police, and increasing police numbers on the streets of our cities, police will be accountable. This is true. But the police will be accountable not to us but the ruling class.
In 1994, then Senator Biden pushed through the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act. It was supported by the Congressional Black Caucus, evidence of the growing disconnect between black political elites and those they should protect. The caucus has, in the face of the current crisis, once again called for the tired and toothless reforms that got us into this mess. “Black elected officials have become adept at mobilizing the tropes of Black identity without any of its political content,” notes Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in the New York Times.
The bill authorized $30.2 billion over six years for police and prisons. Biden boasted that he “added back into the Federal statutes over 50 death penalties — 50 circumstances in which, if a person is convicted of a crime at a Federal level, they are eligible for the death penalty.” The bill, he bragged, authorized “over 70 increased — 70, seven zero — 70 increased penalties in new offenses covering violent crimes, drug trafficking, and gun crimes.” It also established the Community Oriented Policing Services or COPS Program that has handed more than $14 billion to state and local governments, most of the money used to hire more police. COPS also provided $1 billion to place police in schools, accelerating the criminalization of children.
The 1994 bill more than doubled the prison population. The United States now has 25 percent of the world’s prison population, although we are 4 percent of the world’s population. Half of the 2.3 million people in our prisons have never been charged with physically harming another person and 94 percent never had a jury trial, coerced to plea out in our dysfunctional judicial system.
Biden proudly said in 1994 he represented a new Democratic Party that was tough on law and order. “Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” he said at the time. “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties, and my friend from California, Senator Diane Feinstein, outlined every one of them. I gave her a list today. She asked what is in there to every one of them. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the democratic Party is for 125,000 new State prison cells.”
There is only one way to defeat these forces of occupation and the ruling elites they protect. It is not through voting. It will come from the streets, where tens of thousands of courageous men and women, facing arrest, indiscriminate police violence, economic despair and the threat of Covid-19, are fighting for not only an end to racism, but for freedom.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
SC214-9
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55212.htm
Russians Stirring Up Trouble: An Obama Retread Sees Moscow’s Hand in Protests
If one ventures into the vast wasteland of American television it is possible to miss the truly ridiculous content that is promoted as news by the major networks. One particular feature of media-speak in the United States is the tendency of the professional reporting punditry to go seeking for someone to blame every time some development rattles the National Security plus Wall Street bubble that we all unfortunately live in. The talking heads have to such an extent sold the conclusion that China deliberately released a lethal virus to destroy western democracies that no one objects when Beijing is elevated from being a commercial competitor and political adversary to an enemy of the United States. One sometimes even sees that it is all a communist plot. Likewise, the riots taking place all across the U.S. are being milked for what it’s worth by the predominantly liberal media, both to influence this year’s election and to demonstrate how much the news oligarchs really love black people.
As is often the case, there are a number of inconsistencies in the narrative. If one looks at the numerous photos of the protests in many parts of the country, it is clear that most of the demonstrators are white, not black, which might suggest that even if there are significant pockets of racism in the United States there is also a strong condemnation of that fact by many white people. And this in a country that elected a black man president not once, but twice, and that black president had a cabinet that included a large number of African-Americans.
Also, to further obfuscate any understanding of what might be taking place, the media and chattering class is obsessed with finding white supremacists as instigators of at least some of the actual violence. It would be a convenient explanation for the Social Justice Warriors that proliferate in the media, though it is supported currently by little actual evidence that anyone is exploiting right-wing groups.
Simultaneously, some on the right, to include the president, are blaming legitimately dubbed domestic terrorist group Antifa, which is perhaps more plausible, though again evidence of organized instigation appears to be on the thin side. Still another source of the mayhem apparently consists of some folks getting all excited by the turmoil and breaking windows and tossing Molotov cocktails, as did two upper middle class attorneys in Brooklyn last week.
Nevertheless, the search goes on for a guilty party. Explaining the demonstrations and riots as the result of the horrible killing of a black man by police which has revulsed both black and white Americans would be too simple to satisfy the convoluted yearnings of the likes of Wolf Blitzer and Rachel Maddow.
Which brings us to Russia. How convenient is it to fall back on Russia which, together with the Chinese, is reputedly already reported to be working hard to subvert the November U.S. election. And what better way to do just that than to call on one of the empty-heads of the Barack Obama administration, whose foreign policy achievements included the destruction of a prosperous Libya and the killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi, the initiation of kinetic hostilities with Syria, the failure to achieve a reset with Russia and the assassinations of American citizens overseas without any due process. But Obama sure did talk nice and seem pleasant unlike the current occupant of the White House.
The predictable Wolf Blitzer had a recent interview with perhaps the emptiest head of all the empowered women who virtually ran the Obama White House. Susan Rice was U.N. Ambassador and later National Security Advisor under Barack Obama. Before that she was a Clinton appointee who served as Undersecretary of State for African Affairs. She is reportedly is currently being considered as a possible running mate for Joe Biden as she has all the necessary qualifications being a woman and black.
While Ambassador and National Security Advisor, Rice had the reputation of being extremely abrasive. She ran into trouble when she failed to be convincing in support of the Obama administration exculpatory narrative regarding what went wrong in Benghazi when the four Americans, to include the U.S. Ambassador, were killed.
In her interview with Blitzer, Rice said: “We have peaceful protesters focused on the very real pain and disparities that we’re all wrestling with that have to be addressed, and then we have extremists who’ve come to try to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different. And they’re probably also, I would bet based on my experience, I’m not reading the intelligence these days, but based on my experience this is right out of the Russian playbook as well. I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides using social media. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are funding it in some way, shape, or form.”
It should be noted that Rice, a devout Democrat apparatchik, produced no evidence whatsoever that the Russians were or have been involved in “fomenting” the reactions to the George Floyd demonstrations and riots beyond the fact that Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden all believe that Moscow is responsible for everything. Clinton in particular hopes that some day someone will actually believe her when she claims that she lost to Trump in 2016 due to Russia. Even Robert Mueller, he of the Russiagate Inquiry, could not come up with any real evidence suggesting that the relatively low intensity meddling in the election by the Kremlin had any real impact. Nor was there any suggestion that Moscow was actually colluding with the Trump campaign, nor with its appointees, to include National Security Advisor designate Michael Flynn.
Fortunately, no one took much notice of Rice based on her “experience,” or her judgement insofar as she possesses that quality. Glenn Greenwald responded “This is fuxxing lunacy — conspiratorial madness of the worst kind — but it’s delivered by a Serious Obama Official and a Respected Mainstream Newscaster so it’s all fine… This is Infowars-level junk. Should Twitter put a ‘False’ label on this? Or maybe a hammer and sickle emoji?”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova accurately described the Rice performance as a “perfect example of barefaced propaganda.” She wrote on her Facebook page “Are you trying to play the Russia card again? You’ve been playing too long – come back to reality” instead of using “dirty methods of information manipulation” despite “having absolutely no facts to prove [the] allegations… go out and face your people, look them in the eye and try telling them that they are being controlled by the Russians through YouTube and Facebook. And I will sit back and watch ‘American exceptionalism’ in action.”
It should be assumed that the Republicans will be coming up with their own candidate for “fomenting” the riots and demonstrations. It already includes Antifa, of course, but is likely to somehow also involve the Chinese, who will undoubtedly be seen as destroying American democracy through the double whammy of a plague and race riots. Speaking at the White House, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien warned about foreign incitement, including not only the Chinese, but also Iran and even Zimbabwe. And, oh yes, Russia. One thing is for sure, no matter who is ultimately held accountable, no one in the Congress or White House will be taking the blame for anything.
Russians Stirring Up Trouble: An Obama Retread Sees Moscow’s Hand in Protests
If one ventures into the vast wasteland of American television it is possible to miss the truly ridiculous content that is promoted as news by the major networks. One particular feature of media-speak in the United States is the tendency of the professional reporting punditry to go seeking for someone to blame every time some development rattles the National Security plus Wall Street bubble that we all unfortunately live in. The talking heads have to such an extent sold the conclusion that China deliberately released a lethal virus to destroy western democracies that no one objects when Beijing is elevated from being a commercial competitor and political adversary to an enemy of the United States. One sometimes even sees that it is all a communist plot. Likewise, the riots taking place all across the U.S. are being milked for what it’s worth by the predominantly liberal media, both to influence this year’s election and to demonstrate how much the news oligarchs really love black people.
As is often the case, there are a number of inconsistencies in the narrative. If one looks at the numerous photos of the protests in many parts of the country, it is clear that most of the demonstrators are white, not black, which might suggest that even if there are significant pockets of racism in the United States there is also a strong condemnation of that fact by many white people. And this in a country that elected a black man president not once, but twice, and that black president had a cabinet that included a large number of African-Americans.
Also, to further obfuscate any understanding of what might be taking place, the media and chattering class is obsessed with finding white supremacists as instigators of at least some of the actual violence. It would be a convenient explanation for the Social Justice Warriors that proliferate in the media, though it is supported currently by little actual evidence that anyone is exploiting right-wing groups.
Simultaneously, some on the right, to include the president, are blaming legitimately dubbed domestic terrorist group Antifa, which is perhaps more plausible, though again evidence of organized instigation appears to be on the thin side. Still another source of the mayhem apparently consists of some folks getting all excited by the turmoil and breaking windows and tossing Molotov cocktails, as did two upper middle class attorneys in Brooklyn last week.
Nevertheless, the search goes on for a guilty party. Explaining the demonstrations and riots as the result of the horrible killing of a black man by police which has revulsed both black and white Americans would be too simple to satisfy the convoluted yearnings of the likes of Wolf Blitzer and Rachel Maddow.
Which brings us to Russia. How convenient is it to fall back on Russia which, together with the Chinese, is reputedly already reported to be working hard to subvert the November U.S. election. And what better way to do just that than to call on one of the empty-heads of the Barack Obama administration, whose foreign policy achievements included the destruction of a prosperous Libya and the killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi, the initiation of kinetic hostilities with Syria, the failure to achieve a reset with Russia and the assassinations of American citizens overseas without any due process. But Obama sure did talk nice and seem pleasant unlike the current occupant of the White House.
The predictable Wolf Blitzer had a recent interview with perhaps the emptiest head of all the empowered women who virtually ran the Obama White House. Susan Rice was U.N. Ambassador and later National Security Advisor under Barack Obama. Before that she was a Clinton appointee who served as Undersecretary of State for African Affairs. She is reportedly is currently being considered as a possible running mate for Joe Biden as she has all the necessary qualifications being a woman and black.
While Ambassador and National Security Advisor, Rice had the reputation of being extremely abrasive. She ran into trouble when she failed to be convincing in support of the Obama administration exculpatory narrative regarding what went wrong in Benghazi when the four Americans, to include the U.S. Ambassador, were killed.
In her interview with Blitzer, Rice said: “We have peaceful protesters focused on the very real pain and disparities that we’re all wrestling with that have to be addressed, and then we have extremists who’ve come to try to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different. And they’re probably also, I would bet based on my experience, I’m not reading the intelligence these days, but based on my experience this is right out of the Russian playbook as well. I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides using social media. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are funding it in some way, shape, or form.”
It should be noted that Rice, a devout Democrat apparatchik, produced no evidence whatsoever that the Russians were or have been involved in “fomenting” the reactions to the George Floyd demonstrations and riots beyond the fact that Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden all believe that Moscow is responsible for everything. Clinton in particular hopes that some day someone will actually believe her when she claims that she lost to Trump in 2016 due to Russia. Even Robert Mueller, he of the Russiagate Inquiry, could not come up with any real evidence suggesting that the relatively low intensity meddling in the election by the Kremlin had any real impact. Nor was there any suggestion that Moscow was actually colluding with the Trump campaign, nor with its appointees, to include National Security Advisor designate Michael Flynn.
Fortunately, no one took much notice of Rice based on her “experience,” or her judgement insofar as she possesses that quality. Glenn Greenwald responded “This is fuxxing lunacy — conspiratorial madness of the worst kind — but it’s delivered by a Serious Obama Official and a Respected Mainstream Newscaster so it’s all fine… This is Infowars-level junk. Should Twitter put a ‘False’ label on this? Or maybe a hammer and sickle emoji?”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova accurately described the Rice performance as a “perfect example of barefaced propaganda.” She wrote on her Facebook page “Are you trying to play the Russia card again? You’ve been playing too long – come back to reality” instead of using “dirty methods of information manipulation” despite “having absolutely no facts to prove [the] allegations… go out and face your people, look them in the eye and try telling them that they are being controlled by the Russians through YouTube and Facebook. And I will sit back and watch ‘American exceptionalism’ in action.”
It should be assumed that the Republicans will be coming up with their own candidate for “fomenting” the riots and demonstrations. It already includes Antifa, of course, but is likely to somehow also involve the Chinese, who will undoubtedly be seen as destroying American democracy through the double whammy of a plague and race riots. Speaking at the White House, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien warned about foreign incitement, including not only the Chinese, but also Iran and even Zimbabwe. And, oh yes, Russia. One thing is for sure, no matter who is ultimately held accountable, no one in the Congress or White House will be taking the blame for anything.
Monday, June 15, 2020
SC214-8
https://www.globalresearch.ca/extraordinary-disconnect-between-stock-prices-economic-collapse/5715159
Extraordinary Disconnect Between Stock Prices and Economic Collapse
US equity prices are near or at all-time highs at a time of unprecedented economic collapse, a festering main street Depression, unemployment way higher than in the 1930s, with no prospect for a V-shaped recovery, only its illusion.
The Wall Street owned and controlled Fed is responsible for the extraordinary melt-up in stock valuations, money printing madness to blame — saving the stock market at the expense of the economy and welfare of ordinary Americans.
For the first time in US history, the Fed’s balance sheet exceeds $7 trillion.
It’s up from around $250 billion in the late 1980s and $750 billion in late December 2007, the onset of the 2008-09 financial crisis — a colossal example of mismanagement, an eventual price to pay for what’s going on.
Wall Street on Parade (WSOP) noted a disconnect between the Fed’s balance sheet and economic collapse.
At year end 2019, WSOP explained that the Fed “was already deep into a debt crisis,” reflected by its minutes.
From mid-September 2019 to late January, the Fed already “had made $6.6 trillion cumulatively in emergency revolving repo loans to Wall Street” — even though the first US COVID-19 death didn’t occur until February 28.
Flooding the market with liquidity at near-zero percent interest is a virtual open sesame to unrestrained speculation for easy profits — no matter the extraordinary divergence between equity valuations and intrinsic value.
While highly indebted US households pay double-digit interest on outstanding credit card balances, banks and investors have access to near-free money, because of unprecedented Fed policy, changing the rules on how it operates.
As the saying goes, there’s something rotten in Denmark — courtesy of the US ruling class in Washington, at the Fed, and in corporate suites.
From 2008 to now with no end of it in prospect, the White House and Congress let the Fed (aka Wall Street) artificially manipulate markets and interest rates for maximum speculative profit-making.
It’s operating like never before as “both the lender and buyer of last resort,” WSOP explained, breaching its Federal Reserve Act (1913) statutory obligations.
The greater the Fed-produced equity and bond bubble, the louder the bang when it bursts beyond repair.
At the same time, protracted main street Depression conditions have festered for over a decade, conditions today worse than at any previous time in US history.
On June 3, economist John Williams warned that the entire economic expansion since 2009 “is at risk of collapse,” adding:
“Exploding federal deficit and debt shows (a) historic low ability of the US economy to cover (its) government obligations.”
The state of the US economy is the most dismal in its history by virtually all key metrics — notably GDP, retail sales, industrial production, durable goods orders, and unemployment at around 40%, not the phony low-ball Labor Department number.
Annualized Q II contraction is estimated to be about 50%, far exceeding all previous downturns.
And yet the Trump regime and Congress are doing little to nothing to create jobs and stimulate economic recovery — their focus almost entirely on serving corporate America and high-net-worth households.
US policy comes at the expense of ordinary Americans — hung out to dry by ruling class indifference to their health, welfare, and other fundamental rights.
Over a decade ago, noted investor Scott Minerd said “(t)he Fed will never be able to end quantitative easing. It’s here forever” — artificially manipulating markets, adding:
“This policy blunder will have long-term implications for our society.”
“The Fed and Treasury have essentially created a new moral hazard by socializing credit risk.”
“The United States will never be able to return to free market capitalism as we knew it before these policies were put in place.”
Minerd and others believe it’ll take years for the US economy to recover to its 2019 level.
Countless millions of ordinary Americans and others abroad may never recover, including hundreds of thousands of small, medium-sized, and some large enterprises gone forever — millions of lost jobs with them.
Boston-based philosopher king of Wall Street Jeremy Grantham warned of an unsustainable divergence between “depressionary” economic conditions and melt up in equity valuations.
“Both can’t be right,” he stressed. Dismal economic data are worse than during the 1930s Great Depression.
Unprecedented US unemployment makes near-term economic recovery virtually impossible.
In his quarterly letter to investors, Grantham said the following:
“The current P/E on the US market is in the top 10% of its history.”
“The US economy in contrast is in its worst 10%, perhaps even the worst 1%.”
“In addition, everything is uncertain, perhaps to a unique degree.”
Economic and market data reflect “one of the most (extreme) mismatches in history.”
What’s new in the current environment “is the meaningful possibility of a disastrous economic outcome combined with a substantially overvalued stock market.”
What’s going on today in the US economy and markets is unprecedented.
“(T)his event is unlike all” earlier disturbing times.
“It is totally new, and there can be no near certainties, merely strong possibilities” — why he’s “nervous” as “should be” all investors.
US and global economic weakness preceded current conditions.
Supply and demand shocks alone are “generating a much faster economic contraction than that (during) the Great Depression.”
“The (US) drop in GDP and rise in unemployment in four weeks have equaled what took one to four years to reach in the Great Depression and were never reached in the other events.”
Grantham believes it’ll take “at least 5 years to regain 2019 levels of activity…Nearly certain is that a V-shaped recovery looks like a lost hope.”
He added that the notion of a magical vaccine in the coming months to make corona virus outbreaks go away would be the equivalent in poker of “drawing successfully to several inside straights in a row.”
Statistically the odds against drawing it once are over ten to one.
“(W)e have never lived in a period where the future was so uncertain…perhaps to a unique degree,” Grantham stressed.
Current economic conditions and equity valuations are entirely disconnected from each other.
Markets eventually return to their mean valuations, no exceptions in modern financial history.
Is this time different? Will the sun one day rise in the West and set in the East?
Extraordinary Disconnect Between Stock Prices and Economic Collapse
US equity prices are near or at all-time highs at a time of unprecedented economic collapse, a festering main street Depression, unemployment way higher than in the 1930s, with no prospect for a V-shaped recovery, only its illusion.
The Wall Street owned and controlled Fed is responsible for the extraordinary melt-up in stock valuations, money printing madness to blame — saving the stock market at the expense of the economy and welfare of ordinary Americans.
For the first time in US history, the Fed’s balance sheet exceeds $7 trillion.
It’s up from around $250 billion in the late 1980s and $750 billion in late December 2007, the onset of the 2008-09 financial crisis — a colossal example of mismanagement, an eventual price to pay for what’s going on.
Wall Street on Parade (WSOP) noted a disconnect between the Fed’s balance sheet and economic collapse.
At year end 2019, WSOP explained that the Fed “was already deep into a debt crisis,” reflected by its minutes.
From mid-September 2019 to late January, the Fed already “had made $6.6 trillion cumulatively in emergency revolving repo loans to Wall Street” — even though the first US COVID-19 death didn’t occur until February 28.
Flooding the market with liquidity at near-zero percent interest is a virtual open sesame to unrestrained speculation for easy profits — no matter the extraordinary divergence between equity valuations and intrinsic value.
While highly indebted US households pay double-digit interest on outstanding credit card balances, banks and investors have access to near-free money, because of unprecedented Fed policy, changing the rules on how it operates.
As the saying goes, there’s something rotten in Denmark — courtesy of the US ruling class in Washington, at the Fed, and in corporate suites.
From 2008 to now with no end of it in prospect, the White House and Congress let the Fed (aka Wall Street) artificially manipulate markets and interest rates for maximum speculative profit-making.
It’s operating like never before as “both the lender and buyer of last resort,” WSOP explained, breaching its Federal Reserve Act (1913) statutory obligations.
The greater the Fed-produced equity and bond bubble, the louder the bang when it bursts beyond repair.
At the same time, protracted main street Depression conditions have festered for over a decade, conditions today worse than at any previous time in US history.
On June 3, economist John Williams warned that the entire economic expansion since 2009 “is at risk of collapse,” adding:
“Exploding federal deficit and debt shows (a) historic low ability of the US economy to cover (its) government obligations.”
The state of the US economy is the most dismal in its history by virtually all key metrics — notably GDP, retail sales, industrial production, durable goods orders, and unemployment at around 40%, not the phony low-ball Labor Department number.
Annualized Q II contraction is estimated to be about 50%, far exceeding all previous downturns.
And yet the Trump regime and Congress are doing little to nothing to create jobs and stimulate economic recovery — their focus almost entirely on serving corporate America and high-net-worth households.
US policy comes at the expense of ordinary Americans — hung out to dry by ruling class indifference to their health, welfare, and other fundamental rights.
Over a decade ago, noted investor Scott Minerd said “(t)he Fed will never be able to end quantitative easing. It’s here forever” — artificially manipulating markets, adding:
“This policy blunder will have long-term implications for our society.”
“The Fed and Treasury have essentially created a new moral hazard by socializing credit risk.”
“The United States will never be able to return to free market capitalism as we knew it before these policies were put in place.”
Minerd and others believe it’ll take years for the US economy to recover to its 2019 level.
Countless millions of ordinary Americans and others abroad may never recover, including hundreds of thousands of small, medium-sized, and some large enterprises gone forever — millions of lost jobs with them.
Boston-based philosopher king of Wall Street Jeremy Grantham warned of an unsustainable divergence between “depressionary” economic conditions and melt up in equity valuations.
“Both can’t be right,” he stressed. Dismal economic data are worse than during the 1930s Great Depression.
Unprecedented US unemployment makes near-term economic recovery virtually impossible.
In his quarterly letter to investors, Grantham said the following:
“The current P/E on the US market is in the top 10% of its history.”
“The US economy in contrast is in its worst 10%, perhaps even the worst 1%.”
“In addition, everything is uncertain, perhaps to a unique degree.”
Economic and market data reflect “one of the most (extreme) mismatches in history.”
What’s new in the current environment “is the meaningful possibility of a disastrous economic outcome combined with a substantially overvalued stock market.”
What’s going on today in the US economy and markets is unprecedented.
“(T)his event is unlike all” earlier disturbing times.
“It is totally new, and there can be no near certainties, merely strong possibilities” — why he’s “nervous” as “should be” all investors.
US and global economic weakness preceded current conditions.
Supply and demand shocks alone are “generating a much faster economic contraction than that (during) the Great Depression.”
“The (US) drop in GDP and rise in unemployment in four weeks have equaled what took one to four years to reach in the Great Depression and were never reached in the other events.”
Grantham believes it’ll take “at least 5 years to regain 2019 levels of activity…Nearly certain is that a V-shaped recovery looks like a lost hope.”
He added that the notion of a magical vaccine in the coming months to make corona virus outbreaks go away would be the equivalent in poker of “drawing successfully to several inside straights in a row.”
Statistically the odds against drawing it once are over ten to one.
“(W)e have never lived in a period where the future was so uncertain…perhaps to a unique degree,” Grantham stressed.
Current economic conditions and equity valuations are entirely disconnected from each other.
Markets eventually return to their mean valuations, no exceptions in modern financial history.
Is this time different? Will the sun one day rise in the West and set in the East?
Sunday, June 14, 2020
SC214-7
https://www.globalresearch.ca/donald-trump-peacenik-the-american-warrior-noble-and-righteous/5715899
Donald Trump Peacenik? “The American Warrior, Noble and Righteous”
From day one in office to now, Trump breached virtually all his positive pledges to the American people.
No “transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people” occurred.
No governance serving all Americans equitably, “starting right here and right now.”
No “forgotten men and women of our country…forgotten no longer, (no) stop(ing) (of) the American carnage, (no) allegiance to all Americans.”
No end to US imperial wars by hot and other means that rage in multiple theaters with no prospect for ending them.
Like most others in Washington, Trump’s lofty promises were empty rhetoric by a president serving privileged interests exclusively at the expense of peace, equity, justice, the rule of law, and other democratic values throughout his time in office.
Is the transformation of Trump from belligerent president, hostile toward ordinary people everywhere, to peacenik likely ahead?
Has he about-faced on wanting “a very, very strong military,” wanting it more “buil(t) up” than already, wanting to more “greatly strengthen and expand” the US nuclear arsenal (to) outmatch (and) outlast” other nations by leading the nuclear arms race?
The US is a belligerent state, an imperial state, a nation from inception run by its privileged class for its own self-interest — a nation at war on invented enemies at home and abroad throughout most of its history.
No real ones existed, notably not for the past 75 years, no threats to national security from foreign nations.
Yet, with all categories included, the US spends as much or more on militarism, the Pentagon’s global empire of bases, its intelligence apparatus, and wars on humanity than all other nations combined.
Throughout his time in office, Trump supported all of the above.
On Saturday, he addressed West Point graduates.
It’s one of five US military academies that are symbolic of America’s violent culture, its endless wars, its abhorrence of world peace and stability.
“There is no place on earth I would rather be than right here with all of you,” DJT “trumpeted,” adding:
“(T)he American warrior (is) noble (and) righteous…American heroes (sic).”
The US “military’s contributions to our society are an everlasting inspiration to us all (sic).”
It “carr(ies) on the traditions of freedom, equality, and liberty that so many gave their lives to secure (sic).”
From colonial America to the present day, US military forces massacred Native Americans “from sea to shining sea.”
US troops were involved in stealing half of Mexico in the mid-19th century — today’s California, Utah, Nevada, as well as parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming and Colorado.
Following the 1898 Spanish-American war based on a Big Lie, the US illegally annexed Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, Hawaii, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Canal Zone, Puerto Rico and other territories.
After pledging to keep the US out of WW I if reelected president, Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda campaign transformed pacifist Americans into raging German haters — giving him the war he wanted.
Franklin Roosevelt manipulated Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. US intelligence tracked the Japanese fleet across the Pacific, fleet commander Admiral HE Kimmel not warned.
Mass casualties gave FDR the war he wanted.
Numerous 1949/1950 South Korean cross-border incursions provoked Pyongyang’s June 1950 defensive response. Truman got the war he wanted.
US war on North Vietnam followed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin false flag.
In October 1983, US forces invaded Grenada — based on a Big Lie about a threat to US medical students that didn’t exist.
In 1989, Panama was invaded by US troops, former ally Manuel Noriega deposed for forgetting who’s boss.
So-called Operation Just Cause massacred thousands of civilians.
For the past 30 years, endless preemptive US wars of aggression followed.
Based on Big Lies and deception, one nation after another was raped and destroyed, millions of lives lost.
US troops led by graduates of West Point and other US military academies waged and continue to wage preemptive war on humanity.
Their training and indoctrination are all about serving US imperial interests — endless wars against nations threatening no one Washington’s favored strategy.
In his 1935 book titled “War Is a Racket,” General Smedley Butler (1881 – 1940), two-time congressional medal of honor recipient explained what US imperial wars are all about, saying:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.”
“In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.”
“I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.”
“I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”
“I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912.”
“I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916.”
“I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”
“Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
For the rest of his term and if reelected, will Trump focus on peacemaking over “endless wars (by the US) policeman of the world?”
Was saying “(w)e are ending the era of endless wars…(It’s) no longer the policy of US forces to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have not even heard of” an unprecedented change of longstanding US policy?
Not a day of world peace and stability existed throughout his tenure, the same true for most of his predecessors.
The US ruling class considers peace, stability, and adherence to the rule of law anathema to its imperial aims for unchallenged dominance of planet earth, its resources, and populations.
What Trump called “defending America’s vital interests” is all about waging war on humanity by hot and other means at home and abroad so privileged US interests can benefit at the expense of vitally needed peace, equity and social justice.
Changing longstanding US policy won’t ever come from sitting presidents, legislators, the courts, or so-called elections that assure continuity when held.
US ruling authorities yield nothing without being pushed.
Positive change can only come from sustained nonviolent activism in the streets nationwide, not quitting until achieved.
It’s the only way possible for government serving everyone equitably, not just for the privileged few like now.
Nothing else can work, not now or ever.
Donald Trump Peacenik? “The American Warrior, Noble and Righteous”
From day one in office to now, Trump breached virtually all his positive pledges to the American people.
No “transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people” occurred.
No governance serving all Americans equitably, “starting right here and right now.”
No “forgotten men and women of our country…forgotten no longer, (no) stop(ing) (of) the American carnage, (no) allegiance to all Americans.”
No end to US imperial wars by hot and other means that rage in multiple theaters with no prospect for ending them.
Like most others in Washington, Trump’s lofty promises were empty rhetoric by a president serving privileged interests exclusively at the expense of peace, equity, justice, the rule of law, and other democratic values throughout his time in office.
Is the transformation of Trump from belligerent president, hostile toward ordinary people everywhere, to peacenik likely ahead?
Has he about-faced on wanting “a very, very strong military,” wanting it more “buil(t) up” than already, wanting to more “greatly strengthen and expand” the US nuclear arsenal (to) outmatch (and) outlast” other nations by leading the nuclear arms race?
The US is a belligerent state, an imperial state, a nation from inception run by its privileged class for its own self-interest — a nation at war on invented enemies at home and abroad throughout most of its history.
No real ones existed, notably not for the past 75 years, no threats to national security from foreign nations.
Yet, with all categories included, the US spends as much or more on militarism, the Pentagon’s global empire of bases, its intelligence apparatus, and wars on humanity than all other nations combined.
Throughout his time in office, Trump supported all of the above.
On Saturday, he addressed West Point graduates.
It’s one of five US military academies that are symbolic of America’s violent culture, its endless wars, its abhorrence of world peace and stability.
“There is no place on earth I would rather be than right here with all of you,” DJT “trumpeted,” adding:
“(T)he American warrior (is) noble (and) righteous…American heroes (sic).”
The US “military’s contributions to our society are an everlasting inspiration to us all (sic).”
It “carr(ies) on the traditions of freedom, equality, and liberty that so many gave their lives to secure (sic).”
From colonial America to the present day, US military forces massacred Native Americans “from sea to shining sea.”
US troops were involved in stealing half of Mexico in the mid-19th century — today’s California, Utah, Nevada, as well as parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming and Colorado.
Following the 1898 Spanish-American war based on a Big Lie, the US illegally annexed Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, Hawaii, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Canal Zone, Puerto Rico and other territories.
After pledging to keep the US out of WW I if reelected president, Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda campaign transformed pacifist Americans into raging German haters — giving him the war he wanted.
Franklin Roosevelt manipulated Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. US intelligence tracked the Japanese fleet across the Pacific, fleet commander Admiral HE Kimmel not warned.
Mass casualties gave FDR the war he wanted.
Numerous 1949/1950 South Korean cross-border incursions provoked Pyongyang’s June 1950 defensive response. Truman got the war he wanted.
US war on North Vietnam followed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin false flag.
In October 1983, US forces invaded Grenada — based on a Big Lie about a threat to US medical students that didn’t exist.
In 1989, Panama was invaded by US troops, former ally Manuel Noriega deposed for forgetting who’s boss.
So-called Operation Just Cause massacred thousands of civilians.
For the past 30 years, endless preemptive US wars of aggression followed.
Based on Big Lies and deception, one nation after another was raped and destroyed, millions of lives lost.
US troops led by graduates of West Point and other US military academies waged and continue to wage preemptive war on humanity.
Their training and indoctrination are all about serving US imperial interests — endless wars against nations threatening no one Washington’s favored strategy.
In his 1935 book titled “War Is a Racket,” General Smedley Butler (1881 – 1940), two-time congressional medal of honor recipient explained what US imperial wars are all about, saying:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.”
“In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.”
“I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.”
“I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”
“I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912.”
“I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916.”
“I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”
“Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
For the rest of his term and if reelected, will Trump focus on peacemaking over “endless wars (by the US) policeman of the world?”
Was saying “(w)e are ending the era of endless wars…(It’s) no longer the policy of US forces to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have not even heard of” an unprecedented change of longstanding US policy?
Not a day of world peace and stability existed throughout his tenure, the same true for most of his predecessors.
The US ruling class considers peace, stability, and adherence to the rule of law anathema to its imperial aims for unchallenged dominance of planet earth, its resources, and populations.
What Trump called “defending America’s vital interests” is all about waging war on humanity by hot and other means at home and abroad so privileged US interests can benefit at the expense of vitally needed peace, equity and social justice.
Changing longstanding US policy won’t ever come from sitting presidents, legislators, the courts, or so-called elections that assure continuity when held.
US ruling authorities yield nothing without being pushed.
Positive change can only come from sustained nonviolent activism in the streets nationwide, not quitting until achieved.
It’s the only way possible for government serving everyone equitably, not just for the privileged few like now.
Nothing else can work, not now or ever.
Saturday, June 13, 2020
SC214-6
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune20/financial-engineering6-20.html
Our Wile E. Coyote Economy: Nothing But Financial Engineering
The story we're told about how our "capitalist" economy works is outdated. The story goes like this: companies produce goods and services for a competitive marketplace and earn a profit from this production. These profits are income streams for investors, who buy companies' stocks based on these profits. As profits rise, so do stock valuations.
It's all win-win: consumers get competitively priced goods and services, workers have jobs producing goods and services and investors earn a return on their capital.
Sadly, this is a fairy tale that no longer aligns with the reality that the U.S. economy is now a decaying billboard of "producing goods and services" behind which the real money is made in financial engineering, a.k.a. legalized fraud. Take everyone's favorite stock, Apple. The fairy tale is that Apple is in the business of making mobile phones and providing services to this customer base.
According to the fairy tale, Apple's rise in value from $400 billion to $1.4 trillion is based on higher operating earnings, i.e. profits. But if we look at Apple's operating earnings (see chart below), we see that they've been flat for years. So why is Apple worth $1 trillion more than it was a few years ago if profits haven't risen, much less tripled?
The answer is financial engineering: Apple sells bonds that pay a paltry rate of return and then uses the proceeds from this debt (and most of its actual profits) to buy back its own shares--an astounding $338 billion over the past 7 years.
But look at the return on this legalized fraud: $338 billion added $1 trillion in "value" which can be sold by insiders to greater fools who believe the fairy tale.
All the "wealth" created by financial engineering / legalized fraud is fictitious, i.e. phantom. It's based on leveraging debt and trickery, not on profits earned from producing goods and services. Virtually every "success" in America is not from producing goods and services; it's based on leveraging debt, stock buybacks, asset bubbles, marketing (Facebook and Google) or skimming the thin layer of cream off the global supply chain (Walmart and Amazon).
Correspondent A.P. explained how the economy actually works in the following essay.
We humans don't have the brain power to figure out the cause and effect of everything we do.
So, we create stories, shorthand rules of thumb that allow us, based on our previous observations, to predict how the world works.
When the predictive power of one of our stories fail, humans, being emotional rather than rational creatures, will bend over backward to make excuses for the story rather than telling ourselves that, in constructing the story, we ourselves were wrong.
Consistency bias is blindingly powerful.
* * *
I'm a physician.
When I quit my employer, I had certain knowledge that I was the highest producing employee of my class across five states.
Yet when I gave my notice, they didn't bat an eye.
I also have certain knowledge that one year later my resignation led to a loss of $2 million of direct revenue from my labor that my employer would have otherwise captured.
That's when I changed my paradigm.
I had been telling myself that my employer had wanted to purchase my labor.
What it turns out they wanted to purchase was my credibility.
Something they could get from anyone with an MD.
They wanted to use the foot traffic generated by the patients coming to see me to appreciate their real estate values.
They wanted to use my relationships to extract patient information for re-sale.
They wanted to use my name on the door to create the impression they were a healthcare company-- tax exempt benefits and all.
The $2 million drop in their revenue meant nothing to them.
When I left, they simply shared my responsibilities among the remaining doctors, who in aggregate possessed enough credibility that the appreciation of commercial real estate, the sale of patient information, and the benefits of tax exemption continued unabated---dwarfing any revenue my labor could generate.
Then I realized that my former employer wasn't special.
Today, virtually any public concern uses their 'products' as a similar 'front.'
They're not in the business of selling shoes, or oil changes, or makeup any more than banks are in the business of serving depositors or making loans.
They're all in the business of financial engineering.
And because this business model requires access to capital markets, their 'products' are only there to create an impression that they're actual businesses---enough so they can be plausibly sell their debt.
That's why they don't care if their stores get looted, or if they de-platform their most profitable users, the merchandise and revenue are nothing to them.
Being able to sell debt instruments and distribute the proceeds to the organization's 'keys to power' (see The Rules for Rulers 18 min.) is the only thing that matters (and maybe some government subsidies on top).
These companies will borrow and distribute, borrow and distribute until there is nothing left to leverage and the last holders of debt are left holding the bag---usually to be bailed out by Federal Reserve-printed dollars.
Then the leadership will move on to the next business, rewarded not for being shrewd businessmen but for being excellent wealth extractors and financial engineers.
When money is created without the creation of value, the financial reward of building a business by selling something for a profit is nothing compared to the rewards of using that same business to extract wealth through selling debt until nothing is left.
One could argue, in fact, that the virtue signaling we're now seeing actually improves corporate access to the tools of financialization.
That's why these public companies will definitely rebuild in the affected cities, though their efforts will be carried under their marketing budgets.
Debt vehicles with the aura of social approval command a premium.
The same paradigm can be applied to government at all levels, right down to school boards.
These organizations function as a front for the skim.
Public service unions, individual office holders, regulators waiting for their turn at getting hired by those whom they regulate . . .
All are in on it.
They all dip their beaks in the stream of confiscated money while generating no value in return.
The edifice of government simply provides just enough of a front so taxes can be collected to fund the skim without effective push back from the tax donkeys who pay.
This paradigm can be viewed as terribly cynical, but it does seem to explain everything that's happening, and it hasn't failed me yet.
Dollars have no value therefore value creation is not needed to gain them.
What's needed is access to the system through which the printed dollars flow, while not being so blatant that folks have to tell themselves a new story---one in which real value is actually needed if one wants to acquire currency.
Current events are testing the limits people can be pushed to gaslight themselves.
Why pay taxes if the police won't protect your business?
Why purchase a product whose manufacturer hectors you before you buy?
Is it because of a personal failing I wasn't aware of?
Or is it because the world doesn't work the way I've been telling myself it does?
Experience teaches that while the limits of human self-delusion are immense, they're still finite.
Experience also teaches that when those limits are reached, the transition to a new story can be politely described as harsh.
Plan accordingly.
Cultivate what creates real value in your life.
Invest in your own social capital.
And remember:
The bad chases out the good.
First in money . . .
Then in everything else.
Thank you, A.P. for explaining how "business" is just a front for the sausage-making of debt, fraud and bailouts when the fraud unravels. Ours is a Wile E. Coyote economy, and now we're hanging in mid-air, realizing there is nothing solid beneath our feet. Gravity is about to take control, regardless of whatever fraud the Federal Reserve bails out and papers over.
It's wrenching and painful to accept this reality; the fairy tale was so much more Hollywood. But there can't be a Hollywood ending for an economy based on the phantom "wealth" of debt, leverage, Fed free money for financiers, stock buybacks, collateralization scams and marketing skims. When all the skims, scams and frauds crash to Earth, it won't be a cartoon....
Our Wile E. Coyote Economy: Nothing But Financial Engineering
The story we're told about how our "capitalist" economy works is outdated. The story goes like this: companies produce goods and services for a competitive marketplace and earn a profit from this production. These profits are income streams for investors, who buy companies' stocks based on these profits. As profits rise, so do stock valuations.
It's all win-win: consumers get competitively priced goods and services, workers have jobs producing goods and services and investors earn a return on their capital.
Sadly, this is a fairy tale that no longer aligns with the reality that the U.S. economy is now a decaying billboard of "producing goods and services" behind which the real money is made in financial engineering, a.k.a. legalized fraud. Take everyone's favorite stock, Apple. The fairy tale is that Apple is in the business of making mobile phones and providing services to this customer base.
According to the fairy tale, Apple's rise in value from $400 billion to $1.4 trillion is based on higher operating earnings, i.e. profits. But if we look at Apple's operating earnings (see chart below), we see that they've been flat for years. So why is Apple worth $1 trillion more than it was a few years ago if profits haven't risen, much less tripled?
The answer is financial engineering: Apple sells bonds that pay a paltry rate of return and then uses the proceeds from this debt (and most of its actual profits) to buy back its own shares--an astounding $338 billion over the past 7 years.
But look at the return on this legalized fraud: $338 billion added $1 trillion in "value" which can be sold by insiders to greater fools who believe the fairy tale.
All the "wealth" created by financial engineering / legalized fraud is fictitious, i.e. phantom. It's based on leveraging debt and trickery, not on profits earned from producing goods and services. Virtually every "success" in America is not from producing goods and services; it's based on leveraging debt, stock buybacks, asset bubbles, marketing (Facebook and Google) or skimming the thin layer of cream off the global supply chain (Walmart and Amazon).
Correspondent A.P. explained how the economy actually works in the following essay.
We humans don't have the brain power to figure out the cause and effect of everything we do.
So, we create stories, shorthand rules of thumb that allow us, based on our previous observations, to predict how the world works.
When the predictive power of one of our stories fail, humans, being emotional rather than rational creatures, will bend over backward to make excuses for the story rather than telling ourselves that, in constructing the story, we ourselves were wrong.
Consistency bias is blindingly powerful.
* * *
I'm a physician.
When I quit my employer, I had certain knowledge that I was the highest producing employee of my class across five states.
Yet when I gave my notice, they didn't bat an eye.
I also have certain knowledge that one year later my resignation led to a loss of $2 million of direct revenue from my labor that my employer would have otherwise captured.
That's when I changed my paradigm.
I had been telling myself that my employer had wanted to purchase my labor.
What it turns out they wanted to purchase was my credibility.
Something they could get from anyone with an MD.
They wanted to use the foot traffic generated by the patients coming to see me to appreciate their real estate values.
They wanted to use my relationships to extract patient information for re-sale.
They wanted to use my name on the door to create the impression they were a healthcare company-- tax exempt benefits and all.
The $2 million drop in their revenue meant nothing to them.
When I left, they simply shared my responsibilities among the remaining doctors, who in aggregate possessed enough credibility that the appreciation of commercial real estate, the sale of patient information, and the benefits of tax exemption continued unabated---dwarfing any revenue my labor could generate.
Then I realized that my former employer wasn't special.
Today, virtually any public concern uses their 'products' as a similar 'front.'
They're not in the business of selling shoes, or oil changes, or makeup any more than banks are in the business of serving depositors or making loans.
They're all in the business of financial engineering.
And because this business model requires access to capital markets, their 'products' are only there to create an impression that they're actual businesses---enough so they can be plausibly sell their debt.
That's why they don't care if their stores get looted, or if they de-platform their most profitable users, the merchandise and revenue are nothing to them.
Being able to sell debt instruments and distribute the proceeds to the organization's 'keys to power' (see The Rules for Rulers 18 min.) is the only thing that matters (and maybe some government subsidies on top).
These companies will borrow and distribute, borrow and distribute until there is nothing left to leverage and the last holders of debt are left holding the bag---usually to be bailed out by Federal Reserve-printed dollars.
Then the leadership will move on to the next business, rewarded not for being shrewd businessmen but for being excellent wealth extractors and financial engineers.
When money is created without the creation of value, the financial reward of building a business by selling something for a profit is nothing compared to the rewards of using that same business to extract wealth through selling debt until nothing is left.
One could argue, in fact, that the virtue signaling we're now seeing actually improves corporate access to the tools of financialization.
That's why these public companies will definitely rebuild in the affected cities, though their efforts will be carried under their marketing budgets.
Debt vehicles with the aura of social approval command a premium.
The same paradigm can be applied to government at all levels, right down to school boards.
These organizations function as a front for the skim.
Public service unions, individual office holders, regulators waiting for their turn at getting hired by those whom they regulate . . .
All are in on it.
They all dip their beaks in the stream of confiscated money while generating no value in return.
The edifice of government simply provides just enough of a front so taxes can be collected to fund the skim without effective push back from the tax donkeys who pay.
This paradigm can be viewed as terribly cynical, but it does seem to explain everything that's happening, and it hasn't failed me yet.
Dollars have no value therefore value creation is not needed to gain them.
What's needed is access to the system through which the printed dollars flow, while not being so blatant that folks have to tell themselves a new story---one in which real value is actually needed if one wants to acquire currency.
Current events are testing the limits people can be pushed to gaslight themselves.
Why pay taxes if the police won't protect your business?
Why purchase a product whose manufacturer hectors you before you buy?
Is it because of a personal failing I wasn't aware of?
Or is it because the world doesn't work the way I've been telling myself it does?
Experience teaches that while the limits of human self-delusion are immense, they're still finite.
Experience also teaches that when those limits are reached, the transition to a new story can be politely described as harsh.
Plan accordingly.
Cultivate what creates real value in your life.
Invest in your own social capital.
And remember:
The bad chases out the good.
First in money . . .
Then in everything else.
Thank you, A.P. for explaining how "business" is just a front for the sausage-making of debt, fraud and bailouts when the fraud unravels. Ours is a Wile E. Coyote economy, and now we're hanging in mid-air, realizing there is nothing solid beneath our feet. Gravity is about to take control, regardless of whatever fraud the Federal Reserve bails out and papers over.
It's wrenching and painful to accept this reality; the fairy tale was so much more Hollywood. But there can't be a Hollywood ending for an economy based on the phantom "wealth" of debt, leverage, Fed free money for financiers, stock buybacks, collateralization scams and marketing skims. When all the skims, scams and frauds crash to Earth, it won't be a cartoon....
Friday, June 12, 2020
SC214-5
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/10/united-states-obituary
United States: An Obituary
The United States of America was problematic from the start. It was founded on genocide and slavery, and, while frequently congratulating itself on the rights and freedoms it granted its citizens, never managed to confront the demons in its past. The question would arise repeatedly, generation after generation: rights and freedoms for whom?
Nevertheless, the immigrants who founded a nation on a stolen continent managed to show up in the right place at the right time. The luck of geography and history insulated them from most wars in Europe, while supplying them with vast forests, navigable rivers, rich topsoils, valuable minerals, and much of the world’s most easily accessible coal, oil, and natural gas.
The result, after a century-and-a-half of wealth accumulation and industrial buildup, was global dominance. America invented and taught the world the magic formula of consumerism: cheap energy + advertising + consumer credit = ever-growing levels of commerce, employment, tax revenue, and return on investment. The transformation of nature into quantifiable wealth via energy, technology, capital investment, and labor had never before occurred so rapidly, or on so grand a scale.
The 20th century was without question the American century. After World War II, which was fought at a distance from American soil, the dollar became the world’s reserve currency, and there could be little doubt who was in charge. Even though politicians in Washington insisted that their nation led by example and shouldn’t be thought of as an empire, any other nation’s hesitance to adhere to US rules resulted in a CIA-engineered coup, an invasion, or economic sanctions.
At least since the start of the new century, it has been clear that America’s star is waning. The first signs of trouble came in the 1960s and ’70s, as the pointless Vietnam invasion divided the country, US oil production began to decline, and Richard Nixon devised the War on Drugs as a strategy to incarcerate and disempower large numbers of African Americans. Financialization started turning America into a two-tier casino in the 1980s, but the owner class never complained and the renter class had no voice. More needless, costly wars were to come under the aegis of George W. Bush, a clueless rich kid who wandered into the presidency via family connections, a winsome Texas drawl, and a little help from the Supreme Court. The end of Bush’s second term happened to coincide with the peak of world conventional oil production, the bursting of a financial bubble in the housing market, and the start of the global financial crisis. But the nation dodged these deadly bullets, just barely.
Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, was charged with cleaning up the mess. Obama was intelligent, articulate, and empathetic; moreover, in his speeches he appealed to values that united most Americans. However, despite hope from many progressives that his election would lead to substantive changes in economic, military, healthcare, and environmental policies, Obama was unable or unwilling to break with the status quo. Crucially, he failed to prevent Treasury and Federal Reserve officials from crafting a recovery that rewarded the investor class while further immiserating wage laborers.
Speculators, now flush with bailout cash, were eager to identify the Next Big Thing; many thought they found it in the fracking frenzy. Soon small, heavily hyped companies were producing millions of barrels of oil each day from shale formations in North Dakota, Texas, and Oklahoma, while yielding almost no profits for drillers and investors. It was a pyramid scheme, but one with a tangible product. Peak oil was postponed, and America was once again the world’s top petroleum producer.
Throughout the Obama years, social media began playing an expanding role in the daily lives of most Americans. These convenient, addictive, and highly profitable digital tools facilitated fun communication while also fracturing the country’s common understanding of reality. They offered users ever more fodder for whatever they already believed, even if those beliefs amounted to the looniest of conspiracy theories.
In 2008, a European acquaintance asked me how I thought the US would react to having an African-American president. I replied that, given the persistent racism rampant in my country, there would be hell to pay one way or another.
Eight years later, hell arrived in the person of Donald J. Trump, promoter of the discredited notion that Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible for the presidency. Plenty has been written about Trump’s psychology—his narcissism, his lack of curiosity and compassion, and his tendency to be driven by personal grievance. Much reportage has also been devoted to his administration’s alarming actions—its dismantling of environmental regulations, its crippling of constitutional checks and balances, and its dramatic undermining of America’s standing worldwide. Inevitably, a growing majority of the voting public is turning against Trump; his response is not to run a competent reelection campaign (or a competent government, for that matter), but instead to divide the country further on every conceivable issue, with the evident intent of contesting the results of the November ballot, thereby throwing the nation into political turmoil of a ferocity not seen since the spate of urban uprisings and assassinations (JFK, MLK, RFK, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X) in the 1960s, and perhaps not since the Civil War.
Oh, and there’s the pandemic. The emergence of something like the novel coronavirus was inevitable at some point, as public health experts had long warned, but this particular bug just happened to arrive at a moment when America was divided and distrustful. Lack of federal leadership resulted in arguably the most inept pandemic response in any industrial country, with the US leading the world in infections and deaths. While some nations were able to eliminate the virus entirely by acting early and cooperatively, America under Trump dithered and denied its way into a polarized confusion wherein even the choice of whether to wear a facemask is a tribal signal. Up to half of Americans say they won’t take a vaccine when it becomes available.
Due to the pandemic, America is now mired in an economic depression, with nearly unprecedented levels of unemployment and widespread bankruptcies. Meanwhile, the stock market—once again buoyed by unimaginably generous bailouts—is riding high.
As if the nation’s body politic weren’t already riddled with enough mortal ills, the cancer of racism has suddenly metastasized, exemplified in yet another police killing of an unarmed African American. Decades of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, criminalization, and government-backed loan programs that gave a lift to white citizens while holding blacks down have built up an unmanageable backlog of resentments and fears. As emotions reached boiling temperature, Trump responded by pouring fuel on the flames, tweeting, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”—a phrase used previously by Miami Police Chief Walter Headley.
However, days of massive street protests, most of them peaceful and featuring people of all ages and skin colors, have shifted the political calculus of the nation ahead of the November election. As students of the history of authoritarian regimes have frequently noted, once a slide toward dictatorship begins within a democracy, it is difficult to halt; usually, the only force powerful enough to stop it is large numbers of people in the street. The recent protests didn’t specifically target Trump, but they certainly drew energy from long-simmering anger and resentment against him, and his transparent support for white nationalists and institutionalized racism in all its forms. Now military leaders are openly breaking with the president. As a result of these developments, the likelihood of Trump consolidating power over the longer term is considerably diminished.
The protests were an outpouring that a majority of the nation could be proud of. Over the short term, America seems to have dodged a couple of bullets. The possibility of a Trump dictatorship is receding; so is the immediate threat of the pandemic—in most people’s minds, at least. Businesses are reopening, and concerts and sporting events are being rescheduled.
Nevertheless, expectations of a recovery to the status quo ante are not just premature; they’re fundamentally unrealistic. Even assuming that a new administration takes charge next year, the United States is entering a period of political, social, and economic dissolution. Its unconventional oil production rate has now peaked and is in steep decline, a debt bubble even larger than the one that existed in 2007 is ripe to pop, and COVID-19 threatens to wash back through the populace in repeated waves. Meanwhile, the specter of climate upheaval, for which the US is also entirely unprepared, lurks in the background, promising rising seas and worsening wildfires, droughts, floods, and storms.
In short, we are living through the fall of a great power. With it will go a unique way of organizing the world. The symbolism of president Trump cowering in an underground bunker beneath the White House in late May couldn’t be plainer.
It is reasonable to ask whether the United States will continue to exist as a unified nation for much longer. The federal government has become so incompetent as to be increasingly irrelevant to the solution of many pressing problems—and a new face in the White House may not change the situation decisively. Out of necessity, states are exploring strategies of regionalism, as governors in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and the Northeast collaborate to respond to the pandemic. Governor Gavin Newsom has even taken to calling California a "nation state." States do not have monetary sovereignty, and therefore cannot run up huge deficits in order to cushion the impact of economic depression. State banks, which could create and lend money for such purposes, have been proposed as the next-best thing. However, devolution of power to the states may do little to address the urban-rural economic, racial, and political disparities that are ripping the nation’s social fabric....
United States: An Obituary
The United States of America was problematic from the start. It was founded on genocide and slavery, and, while frequently congratulating itself on the rights and freedoms it granted its citizens, never managed to confront the demons in its past. The question would arise repeatedly, generation after generation: rights and freedoms for whom?
Nevertheless, the immigrants who founded a nation on a stolen continent managed to show up in the right place at the right time. The luck of geography and history insulated them from most wars in Europe, while supplying them with vast forests, navigable rivers, rich topsoils, valuable minerals, and much of the world’s most easily accessible coal, oil, and natural gas.
The result, after a century-and-a-half of wealth accumulation and industrial buildup, was global dominance. America invented and taught the world the magic formula of consumerism: cheap energy + advertising + consumer credit = ever-growing levels of commerce, employment, tax revenue, and return on investment. The transformation of nature into quantifiable wealth via energy, technology, capital investment, and labor had never before occurred so rapidly, or on so grand a scale.
The 20th century was without question the American century. After World War II, which was fought at a distance from American soil, the dollar became the world’s reserve currency, and there could be little doubt who was in charge. Even though politicians in Washington insisted that their nation led by example and shouldn’t be thought of as an empire, any other nation’s hesitance to adhere to US rules resulted in a CIA-engineered coup, an invasion, or economic sanctions.
At least since the start of the new century, it has been clear that America’s star is waning. The first signs of trouble came in the 1960s and ’70s, as the pointless Vietnam invasion divided the country, US oil production began to decline, and Richard Nixon devised the War on Drugs as a strategy to incarcerate and disempower large numbers of African Americans. Financialization started turning America into a two-tier casino in the 1980s, but the owner class never complained and the renter class had no voice. More needless, costly wars were to come under the aegis of George W. Bush, a clueless rich kid who wandered into the presidency via family connections, a winsome Texas drawl, and a little help from the Supreme Court. The end of Bush’s second term happened to coincide with the peak of world conventional oil production, the bursting of a financial bubble in the housing market, and the start of the global financial crisis. But the nation dodged these deadly bullets, just barely.
Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, was charged with cleaning up the mess. Obama was intelligent, articulate, and empathetic; moreover, in his speeches he appealed to values that united most Americans. However, despite hope from many progressives that his election would lead to substantive changes in economic, military, healthcare, and environmental policies, Obama was unable or unwilling to break with the status quo. Crucially, he failed to prevent Treasury and Federal Reserve officials from crafting a recovery that rewarded the investor class while further immiserating wage laborers.
Speculators, now flush with bailout cash, were eager to identify the Next Big Thing; many thought they found it in the fracking frenzy. Soon small, heavily hyped companies were producing millions of barrels of oil each day from shale formations in North Dakota, Texas, and Oklahoma, while yielding almost no profits for drillers and investors. It was a pyramid scheme, but one with a tangible product. Peak oil was postponed, and America was once again the world’s top petroleum producer.
Throughout the Obama years, social media began playing an expanding role in the daily lives of most Americans. These convenient, addictive, and highly profitable digital tools facilitated fun communication while also fracturing the country’s common understanding of reality. They offered users ever more fodder for whatever they already believed, even if those beliefs amounted to the looniest of conspiracy theories.
In 2008, a European acquaintance asked me how I thought the US would react to having an African-American president. I replied that, given the persistent racism rampant in my country, there would be hell to pay one way or another.
Eight years later, hell arrived in the person of Donald J. Trump, promoter of the discredited notion that Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible for the presidency. Plenty has been written about Trump’s psychology—his narcissism, his lack of curiosity and compassion, and his tendency to be driven by personal grievance. Much reportage has also been devoted to his administration’s alarming actions—its dismantling of environmental regulations, its crippling of constitutional checks and balances, and its dramatic undermining of America’s standing worldwide. Inevitably, a growing majority of the voting public is turning against Trump; his response is not to run a competent reelection campaign (or a competent government, for that matter), but instead to divide the country further on every conceivable issue, with the evident intent of contesting the results of the November ballot, thereby throwing the nation into political turmoil of a ferocity not seen since the spate of urban uprisings and assassinations (JFK, MLK, RFK, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X) in the 1960s, and perhaps not since the Civil War.
Oh, and there’s the pandemic. The emergence of something like the novel coronavirus was inevitable at some point, as public health experts had long warned, but this particular bug just happened to arrive at a moment when America was divided and distrustful. Lack of federal leadership resulted in arguably the most inept pandemic response in any industrial country, with the US leading the world in infections and deaths. While some nations were able to eliminate the virus entirely by acting early and cooperatively, America under Trump dithered and denied its way into a polarized confusion wherein even the choice of whether to wear a facemask is a tribal signal. Up to half of Americans say they won’t take a vaccine when it becomes available.
Due to the pandemic, America is now mired in an economic depression, with nearly unprecedented levels of unemployment and widespread bankruptcies. Meanwhile, the stock market—once again buoyed by unimaginably generous bailouts—is riding high.
As if the nation’s body politic weren’t already riddled with enough mortal ills, the cancer of racism has suddenly metastasized, exemplified in yet another police killing of an unarmed African American. Decades of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, criminalization, and government-backed loan programs that gave a lift to white citizens while holding blacks down have built up an unmanageable backlog of resentments and fears. As emotions reached boiling temperature, Trump responded by pouring fuel on the flames, tweeting, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”—a phrase used previously by Miami Police Chief Walter Headley.
However, days of massive street protests, most of them peaceful and featuring people of all ages and skin colors, have shifted the political calculus of the nation ahead of the November election. As students of the history of authoritarian regimes have frequently noted, once a slide toward dictatorship begins within a democracy, it is difficult to halt; usually, the only force powerful enough to stop it is large numbers of people in the street. The recent protests didn’t specifically target Trump, but they certainly drew energy from long-simmering anger and resentment against him, and his transparent support for white nationalists and institutionalized racism in all its forms. Now military leaders are openly breaking with the president. As a result of these developments, the likelihood of Trump consolidating power over the longer term is considerably diminished.
The protests were an outpouring that a majority of the nation could be proud of. Over the short term, America seems to have dodged a couple of bullets. The possibility of a Trump dictatorship is receding; so is the immediate threat of the pandemic—in most people’s minds, at least. Businesses are reopening, and concerts and sporting events are being rescheduled.
Nevertheless, expectations of a recovery to the status quo ante are not just premature; they’re fundamentally unrealistic. Even assuming that a new administration takes charge next year, the United States is entering a period of political, social, and economic dissolution. Its unconventional oil production rate has now peaked and is in steep decline, a debt bubble even larger than the one that existed in 2007 is ripe to pop, and COVID-19 threatens to wash back through the populace in repeated waves. Meanwhile, the specter of climate upheaval, for which the US is also entirely unprepared, lurks in the background, promising rising seas and worsening wildfires, droughts, floods, and storms.
In short, we are living through the fall of a great power. With it will go a unique way of organizing the world. The symbolism of president Trump cowering in an underground bunker beneath the White House in late May couldn’t be plainer.
It is reasonable to ask whether the United States will continue to exist as a unified nation for much longer. The federal government has become so incompetent as to be increasingly irrelevant to the solution of many pressing problems—and a new face in the White House may not change the situation decisively. Out of necessity, states are exploring strategies of regionalism, as governors in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and the Northeast collaborate to respond to the pandemic. Governor Gavin Newsom has even taken to calling California a "nation state." States do not have monetary sovereignty, and therefore cannot run up huge deficits in order to cushion the impact of economic depression. State banks, which could create and lend money for such purposes, have been proposed as the next-best thing. However, devolution of power to the states may do little to address the urban-rural economic, racial, and political disparities that are ripping the nation’s social fabric....
Thursday, June 11, 2020
SC214-4
https://kurtnimmo.blog/
2 Million Arab Lives Don’t Matter
Elite the real purveyor of conflict and political polarization.
The hypocrisy of the Black Lives Matter movement is astounding. BLM and its followers shout down those who insist all lives matter, regardless of race. In the BLM universe, skin pigmentation is the determinate, as it is for all racists.
While BLM and identity activists dwell in OCD fashion on racist cops and “white privilege,” they completely ignore the organized mass murder of black- and brown-skinned people by a government that now “takes a knee” for a former criminal, beatified as a saint by the state and its propaganda media. Those responsible for the murder of George Floyd will undoubtedly spend years behind bars, as they should, but this will not quell the outrage and violence committed in his name.
So lopsided and blinkered is the current identity-obsessed movement, it fails to address a far more deadly and vicious adversary—the neoliberal state.
The organized murder of more than two million Arabs in Iraq, Syria, and Libya—more than a million in Iraq, 600,000 in Syria, and 30,000 in Libya—does not even register on the BLM and identity ideological radar.
Barack Obama suffocated the antiwar movement that had coalesced around the Bush neocon invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, thus revealing that much of the political activism was predicated along partisan establishment political lines. Antiwar activists of the Vietnam War era called out both Republicans and Democrats for war crimes. Eisenhower, JFK, Johnson, Nixon—both Democrats and Republicans—are responsible for the murder of more than 3 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.
Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, are directly responsible for arming murderous jihadi mercenaries in Syria and their counterparts in Libya. The latter resulted in vicious racism by Arab Libyans against black African migrant workers and refugees.
In Syria, Obama’s CIA funded and armed mercenaries in an effort to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad. The illegal effort by the US military to defeat the Islamic State in Syria—a psywar operation birthed by the Pentagon in occupied Iraq—resulted in further destabilizing Syria and killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
Additionally, BLM and the supposed left in America have not pointed out the obvious—psychopathic cops are trained, armed (with tanks and other weapons of mass destruction), and enabled by the Pentagon. Why isn’t the Pentagon a site of protest, like it was during the Vietnam War?
The neoliberal elite is obsessed with overturning and destroying nations resisting IMF and World Bank domination and the “structural adjustment” schemes bankster and globalist organizations push (the strip mining and privatization of public services).
Identity is not a consideration or precursor—all who resist, regardless of skin color and ethnicity, are to be hunted down and brutally murdered, as Muammar Gaddafi was for the crime of announcing he planned to quit selling oil in US dollars and establish an African gold dinar.
Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, wasn’t deposed and executed for threatening the US with weapons of mass destruction, as the ludicrous machinations of the Bush neocons claim. Saddam, a former CIA operative in a plot to assassinate Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1959, was a trusted asset until he stepped out of bounds, as did another CIA asset, Panama’s Manuel Noriega.
The Israelis, holding considerable political sway over Congress and the White House, also demanded Saddam Hussein be taken down, primarily for his support of the Palestinians, but also because a nation with a pan-Arabist at the helm was unacceptable.
Likewise Syria. The hereditary regime of the al-Assad family and the Ba’ath party long touted a pan-Arab worldview and this was unacceptable to Israel and the United States.
The covert and illegal war by the US and Israel in Syria has nothing to do with human rights, as espoused. The objective is to destroy any resistance to Israeli expansionism, turn pan-Arabism into an Islamic movement that can be more easily radicalized and thus vilified, and balkanize the Middle East along ethnic and religious lines, thus realizing Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy… to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”
Only politically expedient and exploitable “barbarians” (as they are considered by the ruling elite, never mind the disingenuous rhetoric) will be allowed to protest and demand justice. BLM racism, the absurd demand white people go prostrate in racial submission, and the criminal looting and burning of cities in the name of George Floyd have not set off alarm bells at the Council of Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the institutional thank tanks. These should be the focus of protest, not police departments militarized by the federal government. The Milwaukee Police Department is not the hydra-head. The federal government and its corporate and bankster overseers are the true purveyors of violent conflict and political polarization.
The BLM represents the forefront of an effort to divide Americans along racial and political lines, thus keeping race and identity-based barbarians safely away from more critical issues of importance to the elite, most crucially a free hand to plunder and ransack natural resources, minerals, crude oil, and impoverish billions of people whom the ruling elite consider unproductive useless eaters and a hindrance to the drive to dominate, steal, and murder.
The murder of millions in the Middle East, Asia, South and Central America over the last few decades by a psychopathic elite and its corporate mercenaries does not figure in the equation.
It is an irrelevant historical footnote, if that, to an identity movement that does not threaten the elite and its political class. It is sad to say BLM serves the elite by ignoring or remaining ignorant of the main problem—boundless predation by a neoliberal criminal project that considers all—black, white, yellow, brown—as expliotable and dispensable serfs.
2 Million Arab Lives Don’t Matter
Elite the real purveyor of conflict and political polarization.
The hypocrisy of the Black Lives Matter movement is astounding. BLM and its followers shout down those who insist all lives matter, regardless of race. In the BLM universe, skin pigmentation is the determinate, as it is for all racists.
While BLM and identity activists dwell in OCD fashion on racist cops and “white privilege,” they completely ignore the organized mass murder of black- and brown-skinned people by a government that now “takes a knee” for a former criminal, beatified as a saint by the state and its propaganda media. Those responsible for the murder of George Floyd will undoubtedly spend years behind bars, as they should, but this will not quell the outrage and violence committed in his name.
So lopsided and blinkered is the current identity-obsessed movement, it fails to address a far more deadly and vicious adversary—the neoliberal state.
The organized murder of more than two million Arabs in Iraq, Syria, and Libya—more than a million in Iraq, 600,000 in Syria, and 30,000 in Libya—does not even register on the BLM and identity ideological radar.
Barack Obama suffocated the antiwar movement that had coalesced around the Bush neocon invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, thus revealing that much of the political activism was predicated along partisan establishment political lines. Antiwar activists of the Vietnam War era called out both Republicans and Democrats for war crimes. Eisenhower, JFK, Johnson, Nixon—both Democrats and Republicans—are responsible for the murder of more than 3 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.
Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, are directly responsible for arming murderous jihadi mercenaries in Syria and their counterparts in Libya. The latter resulted in vicious racism by Arab Libyans against black African migrant workers and refugees.
In Syria, Obama’s CIA funded and armed mercenaries in an effort to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad. The illegal effort by the US military to defeat the Islamic State in Syria—a psywar operation birthed by the Pentagon in occupied Iraq—resulted in further destabilizing Syria and killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
Additionally, BLM and the supposed left in America have not pointed out the obvious—psychopathic cops are trained, armed (with tanks and other weapons of mass destruction), and enabled by the Pentagon. Why isn’t the Pentagon a site of protest, like it was during the Vietnam War?
The neoliberal elite is obsessed with overturning and destroying nations resisting IMF and World Bank domination and the “structural adjustment” schemes bankster and globalist organizations push (the strip mining and privatization of public services).
Identity is not a consideration or precursor—all who resist, regardless of skin color and ethnicity, are to be hunted down and brutally murdered, as Muammar Gaddafi was for the crime of announcing he planned to quit selling oil in US dollars and establish an African gold dinar.
Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, wasn’t deposed and executed for threatening the US with weapons of mass destruction, as the ludicrous machinations of the Bush neocons claim. Saddam, a former CIA operative in a plot to assassinate Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1959, was a trusted asset until he stepped out of bounds, as did another CIA asset, Panama’s Manuel Noriega.
The Israelis, holding considerable political sway over Congress and the White House, also demanded Saddam Hussein be taken down, primarily for his support of the Palestinians, but also because a nation with a pan-Arabist at the helm was unacceptable.
Likewise Syria. The hereditary regime of the al-Assad family and the Ba’ath party long touted a pan-Arab worldview and this was unacceptable to Israel and the United States.
The covert and illegal war by the US and Israel in Syria has nothing to do with human rights, as espoused. The objective is to destroy any resistance to Israeli expansionism, turn pan-Arabism into an Islamic movement that can be more easily radicalized and thus vilified, and balkanize the Middle East along ethnic and religious lines, thus realizing Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy… to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”
Only politically expedient and exploitable “barbarians” (as they are considered by the ruling elite, never mind the disingenuous rhetoric) will be allowed to protest and demand justice. BLM racism, the absurd demand white people go prostrate in racial submission, and the criminal looting and burning of cities in the name of George Floyd have not set off alarm bells at the Council of Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the institutional thank tanks. These should be the focus of protest, not police departments militarized by the federal government. The Milwaukee Police Department is not the hydra-head. The federal government and its corporate and bankster overseers are the true purveyors of violent conflict and political polarization.
The BLM represents the forefront of an effort to divide Americans along racial and political lines, thus keeping race and identity-based barbarians safely away from more critical issues of importance to the elite, most crucially a free hand to plunder and ransack natural resources, minerals, crude oil, and impoverish billions of people whom the ruling elite consider unproductive useless eaters and a hindrance to the drive to dominate, steal, and murder.
The murder of millions in the Middle East, Asia, South and Central America over the last few decades by a psychopathic elite and its corporate mercenaries does not figure in the equation.
It is an irrelevant historical footnote, if that, to an identity movement that does not threaten the elite and its political class. It is sad to say BLM serves the elite by ignoring or remaining ignorant of the main problem—boundless predation by a neoliberal criminal project that considers all—black, white, yellow, brown—as expliotable and dispensable serfs.
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